


Until at last we've got it right

by Solshine



Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Blood, CRAZY angst, F/M, Groundhog Day, M/M, Multi, Suicide, low-detail descriptions of death, seriously this is ridiculously depressing I am horrified by my own fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-04
Updated: 2013-09-05
Packaged: 2017-12-10 08:34:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 16
Words: 29,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/784017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Solshine/pseuds/Solshine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They all keep waking up again on the morning of the fourth of June. But they'd made the only choices they knew how to make the first time around, and they don't know what else is expected of them. There's nowhere to go but the barricade.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know what to say guys wow this is pretty much the meanest thing I've ever written I am really sorry. The idea, although not particularly original, was put in my head by this gifset (http://pfirsichkind.tumblr.com/post/45067960831/nobody-said-it-was-easy-no-one-ever-said-it-would) and then fiendishly encouraged by souryellows and firemoonsilverwaters on tumblr. Blame them.
> 
> Betareading done by Graintaire and inkgeek on tumblr, thank you my lovelies <3

Morning dawns over Paris on the fourth of June, 1832, and several people across the city think they have just woken up from a terrible dream.

Enjolras splashes tepid water on his face from a basin and tells himself it is not an omen. Joly checks himself for a fever. Courfeyrac swears off drink and doesn't mean it; Grantaire swears off drink of dubious origin and means it even less. Inspector Javert, sitting up in his hard bed, shakes himself as though dislodging dust from his shoulders, and forgets about it.

At the breakfast table in Rue Plumet number 55, Cosette deposits two poached eggs on her father's plate and asks him cheerily what he dreamed of, as she has on so many other mornings.

And as Jean Valjean has done so many other times to the same question, he lies. "Nothing," he says with a smile, and takes a drink of his coffee. He is too preoccupied to notice the trouble etched on Cosette's face, too.

\---

None of them make a mention of their dreams to anyone, until Marius comes in late to the ABC meeting that evening.

"You look as though you've seen a ghost," says Joly, but the words taste uncomfortably familiar.

"Not a ghost," says Marius, pale and distant. "A dream. I saw a girl on the street… that I met last night in a dream."

"How romantic," coos Grantaire, fluttering his eyelashes. The others laugh, though not as heartily as they might. The room has gone oddly quiet.

"No, I mean it," says Marius insistently. "I mean she was the same girl. I met her the same way, I bumped into her on the street. She was with her father… she was wearing blue…"

"We don't have time for this, Marius," Enjolras cuts him off, but the tightness in his voice does not sound entirely like impatience.

"I've had some strange déjà vu as well," says Feuilly slowly. "Unsettling dreams last night."

Bahorel snorts. "You can have dreams of anything. I dreamed I came to a meeting and here I am," he says. "It doesn't mean I'm a prophet!"

"I've had a funny feeling all day…" Courfeyrac is saying.

"I didn't want to say anything…" puts in Bossuet. 

And just as everyone starts eagerly agreeing over each other, Grantaire's voice cuts in above the others.

"I dreamed we had our revolution," he says. The other voices falter. Enjolras fixes Grantaire with a look that Grantaire steadily returns. "We lost," he says, staring Enjolras in the eye.

There is a silence.

"I died," says Jehan in a small voice into the quiet of the room.

"We all died," says Grantaire, looking away from Enjolras. He wets his lips. Enjolras looks elsewhere too. "We all died."

Marius crosses his arms unhappily over his chest, but says nothing. Neither does anyone else.

"Look," says Combeferre, frowning, "None of this means our dreams are going to come true. It's like Bahorel said, you can have dreams of anything. We're anxious, we've got our plans on our mind, that's all that-"

He breaks off with his eyes on the top of the stairs, and everyone turns around to see who it is. It's Gavroche, looking around at them and breathing hard like he's just run a long way. They all know exactly what he's going to say.

"General Lamarque is dead."

\---

The rest of the night is dedicated to frantic last-minute preparations, and Enjolras forbids discussion of their apparent shared dream. It stops nobody, of course, but they keep it out of his earshot. The next day dawns and Lamarque's funeral happens just as they all remember, the building of the barricade, the assembling of the National Guard. None of the boys raise a peep on the subject, until the spy Javert shows up.

"But that's-" starts Bossuet, but Combeferre has seen Enjolras move toward Javert and stills Bossuet with a held-up hand. 

Enjolras, to most of the boys' surprise, shakes Javert's hand and speaks with him quietly. The rest pretend to go about their business, but when the inspector leaves, they all but leap on their leader. 

"Don't you remember he's a spy?" cries Feuilly.

Enjolras turns to them. His eyes are bright and he is almost smiling.

"And he doesn't know we know that already," he says. "I've given him a false story and he will carry it back. We're now one ahead."

When it sinks in, the young men grin at each other. A nightmare not to be fulfilled but to be learned from-the thought makes them more cheerful than they've been since they woke up from it.

\---

They arrest Javert upon his return, but he is barely tied up before the next attack comes.

This time, Éponine is not the first to fall. It is Bahorel, who, when Enjolras stops Marius from climbing the barricade with the powder barrel, tries to hold off the advance with nothing more than a gun out of shot, and a shout, and his own broad body. 

He takes a bayonet deep just under his left clavicle. Courfeyrac shoots the soldier who stabs him, but Bahorel falls off the barricade and lands on his back with a sickening thud. When the rain starts to fall the powder is already safe inside, but Joly is kneeling next to the gasping Bahorel, trying fruitlessly to keep the blood in his body with only a handful of bandages. 

He turns tearful eyes up at Enjolras, who is standing over them, but Enjolras has no solution to offer him. His face impassive, the rain dripping from his hair, he watches the first of his men die with a cold weight in his chest.

\---

Combeferre has difficulty convincing the others not to waste shot killing Javert in revenge, but he manages. Of course Enjolras remembers the old man who shows up presently, but there is too much going on, too much to keep track of, and again he misses the soldier who nearly shoots him. The old man does not.

He is shoving a pistol at the man before he has finished requesting the charge of their prisoner. The man looks surprised, but Enjolras has just seen that Bossuet has a wound at the shoulder and he does not have the patience to play his role properly. 

His men are bleeding around him. He feels like a fool for trusting in prophetic dreams.

\---

When Valjean, in the alley behind the Musain, cuts Javert's bonds, he has a queasy feeling of familiarity at the action, at how it is not as strange as it should be to look this man in the eye for the first time in nine years. If Valjean feels uneasy, though, Javert looks hunted.

"You must not," says the inspector sharply. He is as tense now as any other man might have been a moment before, expecting death. "You must not, I cannot let you."

"Get out of here," says Valjean.

"You can't," Javert hisses.

Valjean shoots the gun in the air, and despite his protests, Javert only pauses and stares at the other man for a few moments before he takes a few staggering steps backward, turns, and flees.

\---

For his own reasons, Grantaire corks his bottle before he falls into it and does not sleep through the morning. Instead he fights with the others at dawn, and falls off the barricade locked together with a soldier that had nearly shot Enjolras in the head. There are shots fired when they hit the ground. Neither climbs back up.

Courfeyrac dies curled around Gavroche when the barricade is breached; Gavroche dies with the second bullet meant for Courfeyrac.

More survive to be executed than did in their dreams. They are executed anyway. Éponine is shot searching the still-warm dead for the missing Marius.

Javert is waiting for Valjean at the end of the sewer, but he says nothing this time, just trains his gun on his adversary. Valjean says nothing either. He only looks Javert in the eyes, tries to remember something.

If he recalls it, he doesn't say. He walks on undeterred. When he is gone, Javert puts his gun away and falls into the Seine, as he knows he is supposed to.

It is not until the dead of Paris wake again on the morning of June fourth that they begin to doubt they are dreaming.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Third time's the charm...

"It is the people's reluctance, that is why we lose," Enjolras says intently to his roomful of revolutionaries, standing to lean over a table.

"If that's your great insight gathered from all this, you should appoint me strategist," says Grantaire from the corner. "I was saying that before the first time we died." 

Enjolras ignores him. The rest of Les Amis range from frightened to overwhelmed to excited as they have slowly worked out what is going on, but Grantaire seems just amused. Amused, and intoxicated. They have called an emergency morning meeting, but already Grantaire is well on his way to late-afternoon levels of drunk.

The guns and powder are important," Enjolras continues, "but the peoples' support is crucial. We must impress the importance of this upon them in this last day we have. We'll split up and campaign through the most promising neighborhoods--I've got assignments and pamphlets here."

"What shall I do, Apollo?" asks Grantaire, swaggering up to the table when the room had cleared a bit.

"Nothing," says Enjolras sourly. "You're no use like this, you'll be less use in an hour."

"You underestimate me," chirps Grantaire. "I can maintain exactly this level of uselessness all day. I've had practice."

Enjolras turns away, scowls. "I can't believe you can drink when you know what's coming."

Grantaire laughs. It is not a nice sound. "I've always known what was coming," he says. 

 

\---

 

Inspector Javert, as one of the few with no one to compare his experiences with, might be inclined to question his wits if he had ever been inclined to question his wits in his life. 

He has never been, and so he embarks on a careful evaluation of the facts. He asks no less than three people on the street the date, and gets three answers of June fourth. He goes to the Rue de Saint Michel and stands in the place he knows, for an absolute certainty, the barricade stood. He frowns at the ground, as though it has swallowed up the barricade and all its blood and debris. He frowns up at the windows the tables and chairs and cabinets were thrown from, as though the things had flown back through the air and to their roosts.

The last thing he does is go to the river and look at it too, his shoulders straight and his hands joined behind his back, his eyes steely and closely considering. Then Javert nods once, in the manner of one who has made up his mind, and returns to his patrols.

 

\---

 

Valjean is himself engaged in a contemplation of his own sanity, and is too absorbed in it to worry when Cosette excuses herself to her room with a headache after their walk. He was certainly too absorbed to be suspicious this afternoon. There was no Javert patrolling today, and whether that is for good or ill it has certainly not clarified things any further. 

He had managed to avoid the Thénadiers this time around, but between that and his solemn thoughts, he had not managed to notice the familiar young man handing his daughter a letter as they passed in the street.

Cosette does not pull the letter out from where she has hidden it in her sleeve until she has closed her bedroom door behind her. She is loath to even then, and she hesitates before she retrieves it. It is one thing to dream of a wonderful boy, to dream you are falling in love. It is another thing, although maybe not so hard to believe as some might think, to meet him in the waking world and find you shared the same love-dream. But she had forgotten how her dream had ended, holding her Marius, filthy and bleeding, in her arms, until the moment came again last night.

Except it wasn't last night. The date on her father's newspaper this morning told her it would not be until tomorrow night, and this was nothing like poems, nothing like love-dreams. She holds the letter and looks at it--it is in a slightly smudgy envelope, addressed with only her first name, Cosette, in genteel script--and she is frightened. But she breaks the seal and opens the letter.

_My darling Cosette: I am part of a failed revolution, but God is giving us another chance._

 

\---

 

It's the popular theory among Les Amis, though nobody will say it in such words yet except Pontmercy, so spirits are high at the Musain even as they ready for a battle they've all lost twice. 

Javert is drawn the next day to the barricade when it rises once more. He introduces himself to their golden leader with the confidence of an actor who knows his lines. The story the boy gives him of the state of their supplies and their plans for the night are a little different than they were the time before, a little more dramatic, but he memorizes it anyway and jogs away again with a tricolor on his chest.

It is that same sense of duty that draws him back come nightfall, even though he knows he will be recognized, will be captured and tied up and kicked in the ribs by students with clear eyes and righteous revolution in their hearts. But it is what he is meant to do-he cannot shake the certainty of that.

They are not as vicious tonight because they have not yet lost anyone. He has always had an acute memory for faces and names, and he is starting to recognize the ones that surround him. Enjolras, of course, and Combeferre who talked the students out of executing him before, their names are called back and forth across the little cul-de-sac by their people. The inebriate inside with Javert, managing supplies and drinking steadily, is never called for, but once Enjolras comes in to fetch some powder and calls him by name-"Grantaire, if you're going to handle the weapons you need to put the bottle away," he scowls. 

Javert doesn't know the girl's name, the one who died that first night, back when he'd thought it was all a dream. She's here again tonight, no longer dressed as a boy like she was the night she died. Her hair is long, her dress rough. She is certainly a criminal of some kind-ah yes, a lookout. He has seen her before. He has a great mind for faces. 

He wishes he had a name to put to hers when he sees it in the gutter tomorrow.

 

\---

 

He is of course not surprised this time when Valjean shows up. Enjolras shoots his own sniper this time, but it presages another scattered attack, and Valjean pushes a slight young man out of the way and the boy escapes nothing more than a graze. So Enjolras gives Javert to him again. Javert would laugh if this were funny at all.

In the alley he and Valjean face each other like old fellow soldiers pausing in a long march that still has many miles to go. They are silent. Valjean walks behind Javert and cuts his bonds.

"Kill me," says Javert, without turning back around to face his tormentor. "Don't do this. I cannot bear it." He speaks as one who already knows the answer he will get.

Valjean points the gun in the air. "Go," he says.

Javert goes.

 

\---

 

They are less scared this time, more confident. They blaze with righteous confidence in the blessedness of their fight; most of them die in the assault at dawn. Enjolras is among them. Grantaire, wild-eyed, falls shortly after. 

Marius takes a bullet through the stomach meant for Joly. He dies in the sewers on Valjean's shoulders. Valjean does not know where else to take him if not home.

As Cosette opens the door once more to her father carrying the body of her love, she cannot manage to thank God for the extra chance he has given this revolution.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Not everyone who remembers starts out at the barricade.

Supposedly they are all waking up from the same night of sleep as ever, and if their fatal wounds are repealed then surely their weariness must be too. But there are shadows bruising Enjolras' eye sockets, there is fatigue stooping Jean Valjean's shoulders like a phantom weight. Cosette wakes with red-rimmed eyes. Javert makes his patrols with the stiffness in his limbs of someone in pain.

While the others campaign into the night, more feverishly than ever, Marius goes to stand at Cosette's gate as he always does. He has not asked Éponine to find her for him since the first June fourth. She follows anyway. She hates herself for it even as she watches them murmur unheard, watches them frown and cry and smile and touch each other's' hands. She has lived now, once, to see Cosette's father carry her Marius away just before the barricade was overcome; she knows who he goes home to.

They have not talked or teased much since her first death and her deathbed confession. She clears out of the café when she sees him coming, she ducks behind someone else at the barricade (even though she cannot stay away). She doesn't want to see his kind eyes, hear him search for something to say. It's easier like this.

But she follows him to the Rue Plumet anyway, which isn't easier than anything.

They are arguing about something. It is not hard to guess the subject. Cosette's voice is hushed but fierce, Marius' pleading. She takes ahold of his hand through the bars of the gate, wrapping her thin, pale fingers hard around his. Then her eyes flash angrily in a way Éponine would have never guessed they could from their girlhood, and Marius actually pulls back a little, and that is all it takes—suddenly Éponine cannot hate Cosette.

She feels the passing of her resentment of the other woman like a physical loss. It hurts. (Like a bullet in the chest, she might have said once, but she knows how that really feels now.) Cosette will watch over Marius, will take care of him. She looks at them and knows that for certain. Éponine grips the rough brickwork of the corner she's hiding behind until it bites into her hand. She can't hate Cosette.

It doesn't make this easier. It makes it harder.

Since the girl and her father have learned by now how to avoid the Thenadiers during the day, they're in no danger from Éponine's father tonight. They don't need her keeping watch. 

She slips away unseen to find some shelter before the rain starts.

\---

 

Éponine is not the only one who has gotten good at avoiding conversations they don't want to have. Grantaire has been sticking unusually close to Enjolras today, throughout their planning and campaigning, in the Musain and elsewhere. He is in eyeshot always, in arm's reach often, but whenever Enjolras turns to him Grantaire is suddenly across the room or the street, or turned to someone else in intent conversation, or swilling deeply from his bottle with his eyes elsewhere and acting like he doesn't notice that Enjolras is standing there at all.

It makes Enjolras purse his lips and bunch his eyebrows, but insisting on things with Grantaire has never been a particularly rewarding exercise, so he leaves it be. 

Combeferre, who stood next to Enjolras as his leader fell the last time, who saw Grantaire's face at the blow, understands. He says nothing.

 

\---

 

They are getting very good at building barricades by now, not least because Feuilly has started bringing hammers and nails to secure loose pieces. They are efficient and careful, and the defending side is a little sheerer and a little more difficult to climb with their every try.

Courfeyrac has tried to convince Gavroche to stay away from the barricade, but it hasn't done any more good than Combeferre trying to convince Éponine. "Vive la France!" Gavroche shouts, as though that's an argument (and maybe it is). Éponine just drops her eyes and shakes her head, and Combeferre swallows and nods in assent.

As dusk falls, however, just as they are expecting Javert's return, there's someone different climbing up a bed frame to slide down the other side of the barricade. It's a new face, trousers and jacket more than a couple sizes too large and rough hat pulled low over the eyes.

Éponine runs to the new volunteer as soon as they arrive, which is enough recommendation to satisfy the preoccupied boys' suspicion and they pay it no more mind.

"Go home, Cosette," says Éponine, wrapping her hands around the other woman's arms and looking into her face under the hat brim. Cosette stares, startled, back at Éponine, taking in her long hair and dress, her undisguised figure, searching in her face that she might recognize. Éponine does not feel the need to inform her. 

"Everyone dies here tonight," she hisses quietly. "Except your... everyone except Marius," she amends, swallowing around words she can't say. "He makes it, I think. Your father--"

"My father takes him away," finishes Cosette, her mouth a hard line. "But that doesn't mean he always lives."

The bottom of Éponine's stomach drops out. She grips Cosette's arms even tighter for a second, and then drops them altogether. 

"I'm not leaving except with him," Cosette says.

"With who?" It is Feuilly, pausing as he passes. "I doubt any man here would leave by choice. We've put far too much into this fight already."

"Marius Pontmercy," says Cosette, in a voice just a touch lower than natural. "Do you know him?" Feuilly points over her shoulder to a little knot of boys in the corner of the cafe.

Cosette stalks across the café leaving Éponine staring after her.

Marius, checking over the guns with Courfeyrac and Jehan, does not look up and see her until she is quite on top of them, and does not recognize her until she takes him by the arm and pulls him off, to the other two boys' raised eyebrows. 

"Cosette? What are you—Good god, you can't be here Cosette, it's dangerous!"

"You should know," she says, sharply, frowning, her delicate eyebrows pulled together. "You've died here.” She swallows. “You can't stay here. I can't let you stay here. Come home with me, Marius."

"I can't leave," says Marius. "They're my friends, they… I can't. I love you, Cosette, I love you but—"

"Then I'm staying too."

His eyes are wild and pleading. "You can't! This is no place for you! You'll be in danger!"

Cosette sticks her chin out and her eyes glint, and Marius despairs to have fallen in love with this angel in a blue bonnet and not any other girl on the street that day.

"I am not leaving without you." It brokers no argument. Marius' shoulders slump, but he nods and wraps his arms around Cosette.

It is probably for the best that he does not see Courfeyrac and Jehan smile at each other. 

 

\---

 

When the old man shows up to claim the spy, he seems shaken to see the new volunteer, the one sticking so close to Pontmercy. They draw off to the side for a hushed but heated discussion, and then shortly retreat to the alley to continue it.

No one is there to see when they start crying—the youth first, then the old man—or when they fall unhappily into each other's' arms.

"I can't," Cosette sobs. "I can't. I have to stay."

"Shh. All right, all right," murmurs Valjean, rubbing circles on her trembling back as only a father can. His chest is tight, and in spite of himself tears drip down onto the cloth cap from which gold curls are already escaping. "All right," he whispers. "We'll stay."

 

\---

 

The first wave of the dawn attack takes Bossuet—with a lone bullet that pierces through a weak point in their defenses—and then Valjean, who shoves Cosette to safety when a cannonball crashes into the top of the barricade.

Anyone who didn't know the identity of the new young volunteer hardly had to guess when she screamed "Papa."

The boys did not even know the stalwart old man, but it rattles them to see him fall. He'd looked so unshakable, tall and broad and venerable and calm as a mountain, mysterious and fearsome, and until now they had never seen him bleed. He is bleeding now. 

Cosette is crying without sound and shaking violently; Marius has pulled her from the body, turned her away, is wrapped around her protectively, but his eyes go between the corpse of his friend and her father. 

"Fauchelevant," says Marius, because none of the other boys know the man's name and it feels like something that ought to be said. 

"Valjean," corrects Javert quietly; Javert, whom Valjean, protecting his daughter, never had time to buy.

Bahorel walks over and puts a bullet in the spy's head.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Javert does what he thinks he has to do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, so I had reason to quick-reference the wiki article on the June Rebellion and discovered I'VE HAD THE DATES OFF BY ONE SINCE THE START OF THIS FIC. Lamarque's funeral was on June fifth, so in this fic they keep waking up again on June FOURTH. I've got back and fixed it in the earlier chapters, but this is an alert to avoid confusion! :)

The people do not rise. The people do not rise no matter how much and how intently the Amis campaign the day before Lamarque's funeral, no matter how loud the cheers are at their heated speeches. They have split up and make speeches all over the city, gathering crowds and police. The people are eager, agree with fire in their eyes and revolution in their shouts. It doesn't ever matter.

Courfeyrac slinks back to the Musain one June fourth before evening has even really set in. He feels guilty for it, imagining Enjolras and Combeferre soapboxing until the streets darken, but it weighs heavy on his shoulders, knowing from experience exactly what the silent streets tomorrow will look like, the locked doors, the shuttered windows.

It would probably be wiser to just go elsewhere if he doesn't want to run into his surely less discourageable friends, but the Musain feels like the only comfortable place lately, no matter how many of his friends he's seen die there—everywhere else is full of people who don't remember. There's a gravity pulling him back to the only place in Paris that doesn't forget.

He's apparently not the only one who feels that way. When he walks in he sees Jehan sitting at one of the front room tables by himself, writing on a stack of looseleaf paper with a cup of wine in front of him. Courfeyrac sits down across from him. 

"You turned in early as well, I see," says Courfeyrac.

Jehan looks up and nods silently. There's nothing much more for either of them to say on the subject. Courfeyrac reaches over and snags Jehan's wine, meeting no protest. 

"I'm writing a poem about a glorious last stand—I figured I could provide a unique authenticity to the subject," Jehan says, pushing his hair off his forehead with a wry little smile. "I've been drafting it for a couple of days, but it's proving difficult since every June fourth the pages are blank again."

"Keep writing," says Courfeyrac, tipping back the wine. "God help us, June seventh has got to show up sooner or later."

 

\---

 

It's funny, but the hijacking of the funeral procession and the building of the barricade doesn't lose its shine for a long time—every time they do it it's the thrilling first step of a long-planned endeavor. The singing is thunderous, and every face in the crowd is like a sun. Even some of the soldiers, the ones who will be shooting at them by evening, are singing, nervous but with a light just starting to shine behind their eyes.

It is bright and soaring and victorious and righteous every time. Even when the first shots are fired, the feeling is only sharpened by the anger and the smell of gunpowder. They all hold tight to the feeling while they can.

 

\---

 

Javert still follows them to the barricade every time. It is Combeferre who first guesses the truth.

Once the barricade is erected—the building of it is like a well choreographed dance by now, the pieces fit together like a puzzle—and the National Guard leaves them for the moment, Combeferre grabs Javert by the arm.

"Why do you come back?" he demands. The policeman's face, already shielded, goes stony in an instant. He says nothing.

"You remember just like all of us, don't you?" says Combeferre, shaking the older man a little. "You remember but you come back, every time. Why?" Javert regards him without expression. "Why?" Combeferre growls.

"There is a duty I am sworn to do," says Javert flatly. Bahorel, standing nearby, scoffs.

"God, man, your duty hardly matters," Bahorel says. "If you shirked it no one would ever know. You'd live the night, at least."

Javert chuckles at that, a hoarse, dark sound that bears no resemblance to an actual laugh. It is a haunting enough noise as to make Combeferre release his arm, as one might an animal that you've just realized is frothing at the mouth.

"At any rate, your work as spy is done if we know your face," puts in Enjolras. "Get out of here."

"That I cannot," says Javert calmly. "There is someone I have to meet here."

"This may be just a cafe for three hundred sixty two days a year," laughs Courfeyrac unfunnily, "but those days don't make many appearances anymore. Go meet your friend at a pub, not in a war zone."

"He means Fauchlevant," says Grantaire, leaning in the doorway. "Or whatever his name is. The father of Marius' girl. The one who shows up every time to execute him."

They are all quiet for a moment. Nobody asks how Grantaire knows.

"That's a grim appointment you're keeping, Inspector," says Combeferre quietly.

"We don't have time for this," huffs Enjolras. "We can't trust him and we can't watch him. Get rid of him." 

"I can watch him," says Grantaire. "I end up inside monitoring the supplies usually anyway. And it won't be for very long. The old man's been showing up earlier these days." He takes a drink while the others absorb this statement, and grins around the mouth of his bottle as surprise starts registering on the faces around him. "You hadn't noticed?" he says casually.

"If the inspector... and Fauchlevant too remembers," says Joly, frowning. 

"And his daughter," Bossuet points out. "Then who else?"

"It's almost like it doesn't have anything to do with this little revolution," suggests Grantaire, keeping his eyes modestly on his bottle. 

A strange expression passes across Javert's face, but nobody notices because Enjolras is growling and shoving their not-quite-prisoner at Grantaire. 

"This has gone on long enough. We have work to do." 

He means the work of the revolution, and they busy themselves with that. But Javert is not the only one who sets to the by now familiar work of getting ready to die.

 

\---

 

When Fauchelevant arrives—shortly after his daughter again—he is surprised to be handed the pistol straight off.

"He's waiting for you inside," says Enjolras, and his eyes are unreadable. Fauchelevant looks nonplussed, but Enjolras only walks away to oversee the casting of more shot. Combeferre stands and watches Valjean, his arms crossed, his eyes cold.

"He's not our prisoner because he's not a spy anymore," says Marius when no one else will elaborate. "He's just… waiting for you."

He follows Marius's eyes through the open doors of the café, and there is the Inspector, sitting in his usual spot on the floor but without bonds. He is already staring back.

Marius smiles feebly at the older man, and retreats to help Bossuet keep watch. But Cosette frowns and asks a question with her eyes that her father cannot answer.

Valjean goes into the café and stands before Javert because he isn't sure what else to do. Javert stands, as though ready to be marched out to the alley, but Valjean stops him with a hand on his shoulder. Javert flinches at the touch. Valjean drops his hand.

"He's been waiting since this morning for you to show up and shoot him," says Grantaire, who has been watching from a seat atop a powder barrel. "He insisted. We could not dissuade him. At this point it would be rude not to oblige."

"Papa, what—?" says Cosette, coming in behind her father. Valjean squeezes his eyes shut and swallows, unseen by her, unseen except by Javert and Grantaire.

"Your father and I"—only Grantaire sees the bracing clench of Valjean's jaw—"are old… acquaintances. We merely have some business to address." Cosette glances at the inspector but then looks right back to her father.

"Why do they expect you to shoot him?" Cosette asks Valjean, bewildered, concerned. (On his powder barrel, Grantaire raises his eyebrows and takes a drink.)

Valjean opens and then closes his mouth. "They think that—"

"Mademoiselle," says Javert, cutting him off, stepping around him to look Cosette in the eye. "I assure you it is nothing for you to worry about. Your father is…" 

Javert wets his lips. He takes a deep breath. "Your father is a good man." 

Valjean turns suddenly around toward them but neither sees the wetness in his wide, shocked eyes, not Javert, not Cosette. "You should be proud of him."

Valjean blinks his eyes dry before Cosette gives him an uncertain smile, and he smiles back at her.

There is a weighty pause. 

"I think," says Javert, "I shall take my leave of you both, then," because maybe this was what his purpose in returning back here that even he hadn't been able to name, maybe this was the penance that God required of him to break this punishment. "I see no reason to bother you any longer." 

Valjean looks about to say something, and for a moment Javert thinks it's going to be "Stay." But he doesn't say it, and of course it isn't. Javert bows first to Cosette, and then to Valjean, and leaves the Musain by the back alley.

 

\---

 

Just after the dawn of June sixth, Cosette and Marius escape at her father's urging through the sewers. Valjean is shot guarding the grate.

There is nobody waiting for them at the other end. They are not aware that there should be. They struggle home exhausted, and filthy, and weeping.

Javert watches the last of June sixth pass on top of his familiar bridge, leaning on the rail and staring down at the water.

He blinks and wakes up in his bed on the morning of June fourth. Inspector Javert puts his uniform on, goes promptly down to the bridge again, and in the bright sunshine for the first time, tips himself into the Seine.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A long overdue conversation.

Grantaire becomes more erratic with every day, with every death. He drinks steadily from the moment he wakes, as far as Enjolras can tell from their morning meetings, which he doesn’t think was always true. And the way Grantaire watches him—he has always watched him, of course, Enjolras knows that, and Grantaire’s eyes have never held much hope. But they used to hold humor, at least. This looks uncomfortably like despair.

And there is that first death still unspoken of, Grantaire’s cold hand in his, nothing like despair in his face, nothing like despair in Enjolras’ chest. It’s easy not to think about it, easier to snap and scoff at Grantaire like nothing’s changed, especially when Grantaire is flippant or sarcastic. But sometimes when Enjolras is very tired (he is always tired now) he sees that morning in Grantaire’s reddened eyes and he’s seized by the irrational urge to take his hand again, find out if it’s still cold.

Grantaire asks every June fourth at their morning meeting for an assignment. Sometimes Enjolras actually gives him one. He watches Grantaire shamble out of the meeting room one day on a small errand and sighs.

“He died next to me,” he says to Combeferre, who is bent over their marked-up map of Paris. Combeferre looks up and Enjolras glances to him. “The first time. I was the last to be executed but they hadn’t found him. He pushed through to die next to me.” No one else had been around to see, and Enjolras needs someone to know, to manage the fact for him. Combeferre has always done a good job of managing facts for Enjolras.

“He always dies next to you,” Combeferre says quietly.

Enjolras looks at him but Combeferre only looks back. Then Feuilly comes over with a report about the guns and it’s a thought for another time.

\---

Somebody probably should have put their foot down at some point about Grantaire being inebriated at the scene of a battle. Probably Enjolras should have. Something bad was bound to come of it eventually. But this is Grantaire. Grantaire is lucky. Besides, drunk is his tipsy, tipsy his sober. Nobody worries. Not too much, anyway.

Since stopping Marius in his threat to blow the barricade up, the boys have had to deal more personally with the chaos of the first onslaught. Tonight several of them are on top of the barricade, firing at oncomers or struggling with those trying to climb. Jehan is there, shooting as fast as he can with guns handed up to him by Courfeyrac, and Bahorel, of course, cudgeling climbers with a chair leg. Enjolras, having run out of shot and dropped his weapon, is wrestling with a soldier over his rifle, and Grantaire is beating another with the butt of his empty gun. 

Grantaire is perched atop a peak of the barricade, swaying and bright-eyed with drink, battering his assailant joyfully. His smile is broad and sweat stands on his forehead, and for a moment he is untroubled by their mystery, unafraid of death. Then with a final, particularly emphatic swing, he connects with the soldier’s temple, and the man falls. Grantaire, with his precarious position and drunken balance, pitches forward after him.

The barricade is built high, and has little obstacle to slow a fall, and the opposite side is difficult to scale and completely exposed to enemy fire. None of this actually enters Enjolras’ calculations, however. Grantaire is simply falling, so Enjolras lurches forward and grabs the back of his shirt, pulling him back to safety.

It is only a moment’s inattention from his struggle for the soldier’s gun, but it’s enough. He gets a bayonet neatly below his sternum, gun-muzzle deep, and his breath goes out of him in a gust. He does not cry out. He just blinks hard a couple of times, and falls backward.

He must black out for a second or two, because the next thing he’s aware of is Grantaire’s voice saying “No, no, no, no, no,” over and over, Joly and Grantaire’s faces over him, the smell of wine on Grantaire’s breath, the smell of blood on his hands, everywhere, Enjolras’ blood. Grantaire’s hands bright red with blood pushing Enjolras’ hair out of his face. Grantaire arguing with Joly.

Enjolras tries to say “Don’t bicker,” but he never quite makes it. 

\---

The next June fourth morning he gives Courfeyrac and Combeferre his usual campaigning patch, and nods Grantaire over as the others file out.

“Do you have a job for me, Apollo?” says Grantaire coming over, not nearly as casually as he’s trying to sound. Enjolras nods as Jehan, the last, walks out with only a curious glance backward.

“I want to talk to you.”

Grantaire laughs, strangled and a little desperate. “Yes,” he says. “I supposed you would.” He throws himself into a chair, and it is only then that Enjolras notices Grantaire neither smells of wine today nor has a bottle with him, for the first time in many a morning meeting. The realization steals his words from him for a moment and they both wait in silence, Grantaire slumped in his seat and staring at the ground, Enjolras standing and staring at Grantaire.

Grantaire clears his throat. “You, uh. You don’t need to worry about me doing that again,” he says, and though he tries to be businesslike there’s something brittle in his voice. “I mean, I can’t promise I won’t be drunk, because I know better than to make that promise. But I’ll stay off the barricade if I am. I won’t put other people in danger. You don’t need to worry,” he says again.

“I know I don’t,” says Enjolras, and he’s surprised to find that it’s true. It had not occurred to him that he should worry. Grantaire’s shoulders relax just a little, and Enjolras realizes he probably expected to be told to stay away. Before he knows what to say, Grantaire is speaking again.

“I’m sorry,” he blurts. Enjolras stares. He isn’t sure he’s ever heard Grantaire apologize before, for anything. Normally he only shrugs the shrug of a perpetual disappointment (Grantaire’s words) and smirks.

“I’m sorry,” Grantaire says again, looking up as though suspecting that Enjolras would doubt his ears. He coughs. “It’s just that… you know, I want this nightmare to stop as much as anyone. But every time we… You… So I can never manage to hope any given go round is the last one. I always end up wishing for one more. Because I don’t want any of these outcomes to be the one that takes. And if the last one had been it… I would have never had the chance to tell you I was sorry.” He coughs again. “So.”

There is silence again. They’re a fine pair, the stammering loudmouth and the tongue-tied orator.

“Thank you,” says Enjolras finally. Grantaire nods and stands. “…But that wasn’t what I wanted to talk about.” Grantaire raises an eyebrow and Enjolras takes as subtle a deep breath as he can manage. 

“I’ve been wanting to talk to you about the first time, actually. The first time we died.” 

That strangled laugh again. “What a coincidence,” he says. “I haven’t been.” He turns to walk away, but Enjolras steps forward and grabs his hand, doesn’t think about it, just does it. Grantaire freezes instantly. His hand is cold. Enjolras laces their fingers together like that other morning, so many days ago, two days from now.

“I just wanted to say thank you,” Enjolras says softly. He sees Grantaire’s throat work around a swallow and his eyes pull down slowly from the opposite wall to their joined hands. “I was… scared. I’ll admit it, I was. I’d never died before, after all.” He doesn’t mention what they’ve all discovered, which is that dying doesn’t really get easier with practice like you’d think it might. “You didn’t let me die alone. You have never let me die alone.”

“It isn’t as selfless as you make it sound,” says Grantaire, smirking just a little down at their hands. “It was more a matter of not wanting to live alone.” He bites the inside of his cheek. “You, er. You do know why, I hope? We don’t have to have that conversation too?” 

“No,” says Enjolras. “I… I do know, and I…” He wets his lips. “I… appreciate it.” It’s not exactly what he meant to say, but Grantaire is starting to smile at the floor, and his hand has grown warmer in Enjolras’. So Enjolras smiles awkwardly too and squeezes, and they drop their hands comfortably back to their sides.

“So _do_ you have a job for me?” says Grantaire, looking up at Enjolras at last.

“I believe I gave Bahorel instructions that he will interpret as ‘start a small riot near the tile factory,’ if that sounds of interest,” says Enjolras, with a real smile this time.

“What could you have possibly told him that he would hear as ‘small riot?’” says Grantaire.

“I said ‘Please don’t start a riot.’ Try to break it up before nightfall, though, we’ve got a lot of work to do.”

Grantaire bows in assent, and heads out the door.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As things start wearing on them all, priorities start to shift.

Bossuet and Joly wake up on either side of Musichetta at the same time. They always wake up at the same time on June fourth now, right after dawn, as though they're both grasping for consciousness as soon as it is allowed.

Although they feel these days like they hardly remember the third, they are glad they chose to spend that night at Musichetta's place instead of going home to Joly's. They meet each other's eyes silently over her sleeping form, and lace their fingers together on her hip. It's happened enough to be a ritual by now, and that alone is unsettling. How many lasts can you have?

They lay and enjoy another last quiet morning, another last untroubled dream for her, another last June fourth. They won't wake her until they have to. Let her sleep.

Because Musichetta doesn't remember.

\--

They come to the morning meetings like always, though they stop at a bakery first and pick up a gross of sweet rolls just for something different, at Bossuet's suggestion. When they arrive with the basket, they are cheered as heroes and mobbed. Joly smiles at Bossuet as the rest of the boys descend on the rolls, because this was a good idea. It's almost like this isn't the same meeting they've held too many times now.

"How's your girl--Musichetta?" says Bahorel brightly around a mouthful. Joly pulls himself up to sit on a table and swings his feet, his eyes crinkling in responding cheer.

"Oh, she's good. You know, as good as always. She still doesn't understand why we're having a morning meeting, much less how I know to go to it." 

A couple boys chuckle but Combeferre and Enjolras exchange a look like they're thinking of something they've talked about before. Enjolras nods. Nobody else notices.

When a few have left (it takes them longer to go their separate ways in the morning now; few of them even pretend the same enthusiasm they once had, and they linger at the Musain while it is still a place friendly and peaceful) Enjolras approaches Joly and Bossuet.

"Got a job for us, chief?" says Bossuet, but Enjolras shakes his head. 

"No. You're released for the day." 

Bossuet's forehead creases. "But we can help. It's the last day before the fight, we need all the men we can get."

"And two days from now we will have another last day," says Enjolras, perhaps a little more snappishly than he intended. Joly's eyebrows lift, and Enjolras sighs and passes his hand in front of his face like brushing away the bitter thought.

"All the more reason for you to spend the day elsewhere if you have people you care about," Enjolras says instead. 

Bossuet smiles, with the cheerful gallows humor that few wear as well as he.

"The way you talk," he says, "It's almost like you think we're going to lose."

\---

They stop by the bakery again on the way back and get some little glazed cakes. It's Bossuet's last sou, but they don't worry about it. And it's worth it to see the look on Musichetta's face when she opens the door to see them bearing gifts.

"Fetch your bonnet," says Joly. "We're going to the park."

"Maybe I had other plans," she sniffs, but drops the charade immediately in favor of a dazzling smile.

"You could have just said," she scolds as she goes to get said bonnet. "Morning meeting indeed!"

\---

At 55 Rue Plumet, Cosette is tying on her bonnet for a walk with her father. She has asked to go to the meetings, to help Marius and his friends, but her father forbade it with startling intensity-as though the political rallies were the great danger, not the barricade where he's died twice and she once (she told him they escaped, that first morning, because she will come to grips with the memory of being shot in the chest, of dying on the stone-paved street, she will make sense of it, she will be all right; she is not sure her father would). 

She asked also about the man at the barricade, the "old acquaintance," because she feels sure this must be some key piece in the puzzle of her father's past. But to her questions he did nothing but shake his head.

So here is what her father can give her instead of answers: a walk to the park, a seat on a bench. When a familiar face comes around the curve of the path, Cosette smiles radiantly and barely stays calmly seated, as her father rises from the bench beside her and walks toward her love. 

They depart down the path, her father and Marius, and Cosette itches to see them walk off to a distance out of earshot. She doesn't fear her father disapproving of Marius, exactly. He's saved her love's life more times than she's actually sure she knows, and she can hardly picture him running Marius off now. But her father has always been awfully… And Marius, as much as she loves him, is so… And she knows that they're talking about her, she knows it. (Never mind what these two people who adore her so could possibly have bad to say about her; the mind of a teenage girl is uniquely suspicious.)

But she sits and she waits and fidgets, until at last Marius and her father turn around and come back up the path toward her again. Valjean's smile is fond but sad, though of course Cosette hardly notices; her eyes are only for the nervous but dizzily happy grin on Marius' face. 

Valjean hangs back as Marius continues forward. Before the young man is even within ten paces of the bench, Cosette has risen to her feet and they are both holding their hands out to the other. When their hands join they sink down to the bench, looking into each other's eyes, smiles on their lips and flushes on their cheeks.

Valjean withdraws to give them a little privacy and finds himself staring at a lilac bush to keep from hovering over his daughter and her suitor.

The garden of the young, he reminds himself.

\---

Watching from across the street as she sometimes (always) does, Éponine sees Marius depart the Musain alone again, but doesn't follow him as she might once have. Instead she turns her focus to Gavroche, walking out at the same time as a couple of the boys but heading a different direction and waving cheerily back at them. 

After a moment's consideration, Éponine jogs to catch up with him.

"Hello," she says. 

"Hello," says Gavroche. 

They walk in silence for a moment.

"I'm not sure if you recognize me, but I'm-"

"You're my sister, yeah," he cuts in. "Éponine. I know."

"And you're Gavroche," she returns, just to prove she knows his name too. "It's just, you don't come by that often, so I wasn't sure," Éponine explains, rubbing the back of her neck. 

He flashes a smirk up at her. "Can you blame me?" he says.

"Not really," she agrees.

Another silence.

"So… what are you doing?" she asks a little desperately.

"I've got some errands to do," says Gavroche, "but afterward I'm meeting the boys at a rally. Courfeyrac said I can give a speech this time," he declares, sticking his thumbs behind his braces in pride. 

"Errands?" Éponine frowns. "What sort of errands?"

"Well, you can come along if you like," says Gavroche generously, "Long as you don't get in the way."

The errands turn out to be a practiced dance through the slums of Paris, a complicated string of theft and charity that rather boggles Éponine. He slips a knife from a dangerous-looking man's boot and not twenty paces later uses it to cut free the pouch hanging on another man's belt. Neither notices. He stabs an apple off a seller's cart with the knife, and then crosses the street and drops the purse in an old lady's lap and hands both apple and knife to a boy about his own age. Further down the street a string of shining glass beads are lifted discreetly from the wares of a peddler and handed over to a young urchin girl standing nearby. 

"She'd have nicked them herself otherwise," Gavroche explains to Éponine as they hurry on. "Only she isn't any good at it, and she'd have gotten nabbed."

Without warning he darts down an alley and despite her longer legs, Éponine is pressed to keep up with him as he runs. He jumps out at the end of the alley just in time to grab another boy by the back of the shirt and jerk him out of the path of a carriage coming much too fast around the corner.

"You'd think you'd hear it coming one of these days," he says fondly, brushing the dazed boy briskly down.

"Do you do all this every day?" marvels Éponine as her little brother redistributes another purse and a couple of bread rolls. "I mean, every fourth?"

"Lately, yeah," says Gavroche. They pause on a street corner, and watch a woman put out a bowl of milk on her doorstep, presumably for some cat.

"What's the good of it though?" she asks. "If you're just going to have to do it again. It doesn't help them in the long run. We don't even have a long run anymore."

The woman closes her door and Éponine follows Gavroche as he carefully picks the bowl up and carries it down the street without spilling a drop.

"Since when do folks like us ever get a long run?" he asks her simply, without bitterness. "It's a day and then another day, that's how it's always been. And they're here every fourth, ain't they? Sure they'll be hungry again soon, but that's the way it works anyhow."

He turns down an alley. "Knock on that door there, will ya?" he says. Éponine obliges. A young woman answers, thin and hollow eyed, with a baby in her arms. Gavroche holds out the bowl of milk and as she takes it, blinking in surprise, he tips an imaginary hat and walks off again.

"A little hard on the cat," says Éponine, smiling, swallowing around something suddenly in her throat.

"Cats is smart," says Gavroche. "You don't need to worry about them. Cats can take care of themselves."

"Well," says Éponine quietly, out of his hearing, looking at her dirty, bright-eyed little brother, "maybe they shouldn't have to." 

\---

From there they head shortly to a slightly more affluent neighborhood, where Éponine assumes one of the rallies is being held. Her guess is confirmed when she hears the shouts of a crowd blocks before they reach the crowd itself; when the sound reaches them, Gavroche grins and sets off into a run. Éponine laughs and follows.

It is Combeferre and Courfeyrac heading this rally, standing on wooden crates and distilling their favorite human rights edicts into memorable points and catchy slogans. Gavroche breaks away from his sister and weaves through the legs of the listening crowd. Éponine, prohibitively taller, has to go around. 

Gavroche reaches Courfeyrac and Combeferre before her, and Courfeyrac cuts himself off mid-sentence to jump down from his crate when he sees Gavroche. When he notices, Combeferre jumps down too, and stacks his crate on top of Courfeyrac's. 

Gavroche really meant it, realizes Éponine with surprise. And judging from the solemn expressions on the two men's faces, they are not merely humoring a child's fancy. She reaches the front as Courfeyrac is lifting Gavroche up onto his makeshift podium. Combeferre smiles at her in recognition and she smiles briefly back. 

The crowd starts to chuckle at the young boy standing in the place of the commanding young men that had just been speaking, but Gavroche's expression is thunderous.

"My name's Gavroche," he shouts, loud enough to be heard by the back of the crowd, which prompts a few more chuckles, and one voice to call "How d'ye do, Monsieur Gavroche!" Gavroche pays them no mind. "I'm proud to be French," he declares, which is received by scattered cheers. "And I'm proud to be Parisian!" More cheers this time. "And," he says, glaring around at the crowd, "I'm proud to not be one of you!"

There is a surprised silence at that.

"You come here and you cheer for liberty and France and all," he shouts, "but if we had the revolution tomorrow, you wouldn't fight for 'em, would you?" There's a couple shouts of support, but Gavroche stares them down. "I would!" he says, sticking out his chest. "I'd die for 'em! I'd be happy to!" He points down at the two men standing to his side. "They'd die for France! My sister would die for France!" he says, turning his pointing finger at Éponine. 

Her face reddens, because she hasn't yet once fought or died for France, only for someone else who has. Apparently Gavroche hasn't noticed. Combeferre is shooting her a surprised look, which makes her redden further. He's probably not from a family where siblings barely know each other.

"We'd die," Gavroche is saying, "and you'd let us!"

The crowd is murmuring now.

"Should we be letting him say all this?" she whispers to Combeferre. Because where Éponine comes from you keep your head down, you don't make waves, you live to see the next day that way. 

Courfeyrac's face is hard as he watches Gavroche, and his arms are crossed over his chest. "A few goes in, I locked Gavroche in the cupboard of the Musain just before the barricade was overcome and made him swear to me not to make a sound. He said the soldiers found him and shot him anyway." 

Éponine's stomach twists painfully. 

"Let them hear it," Courfeyrac says. "He's done more for them than they could ever make up. He deserves to talk."

Combeferre and Éponine do not argue.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everybody deals with the burden of the barricades in different ways.

There are only so many times even the most devoted revolutionary can die for liberty before it starts to grate.

Feuilly, the only real working man among them, is much more careful with his money, compared to the cheerful, careless poverty of many of his friends. It still never stretches very far.

One fourth, however, before the evening meeting, he goes home, takes the purse with all of his current savings out from under his pillow, then goes out and spends it all. He takes his spoils to the Musain, then smiles at the barmaid and convinces her to keep them behind the counter.

The next evening, after the last attack (they can set their watches by the attacks now), as they are all settling in—Jehan staring at a small stack of blank paper in his lap, Marius and Cosette sitting together, foreheads and knees bumping, talking quietly, Courfeyrac making jokes with Gavroche with Éponine sitting nearby—Feuilly goes back inside the café and brings out his treasure. There is so much, it takes him four trips.

It’s paint. Powder pigments and cans of oil to mix them in, paint and paint and paint, and stirring sticks and brushes, and a discarded board to mix them on, and more paint. The others watch with surprise as Feuilly lays them all out in a line, opens, mixes, blends. Grantaire sits up a little straighter, and his fingers twitch on his wine bottle.

“That’s an awful lot of paint,” Bahorel points out helpfully. Feuilly doesn’t answer, just goes on mixing and straightening, a look of concentration creasing his face.

Grantaire sets his bottle down and comes silently over, pausing in front of the collection in silent question. Feuilly, squatted in front of his paints, looks up at Grantaire long enough to nod once, and then returns to his work. Grantaire crouches too, and sets to work mixing pigments as he hasn’t done in far too long.

With Grantaire working on the paints, Feuilly is free to set to his work. He turns toward the barricade, and every one of the boys is watching him but not saying anything. And Feuilly loads a wide paintbrush up with yellow, and starts painting. 

The barricade is less of a jumble now than it was the first time they built it, but it is still not a flat surface; it’s stepped for better climbing, and it is still made of furniture, of tables and chairs and crates, with protruding legs and edges. Feuilly brushes over the flattest surfaces with wide strokes, but then pushes paint into crevices and along outcrops. He crawls a step up the barricade to paint above his head, and kneels to paint next to the ground. Grantaire keeps mixing paints for him, and Feuilly keeps painting.

He starts with yellow, and there’s certainly a lot of it, but soon he starts mixing in oranges and reds and pinks, and at the bottom, browns and blacks, highlighted with more yellows, more oranges and reds.

Everyone sits and watches in silence as he works, even though the night is wearing on, even though none of them have slept. Even Enjolras stands in the doorway of the café, leaning on the doorframe and watching—both Feuilly painting, and Grantaire solemnly mixing paints. Grantaire, absorbed in his task, doesn’t notice.

By the time the last bit of the paint has been scraped from the makeshift palette, the sky is graying with dawn.

Standing straight in front of it, at eye level, the disjointed pieces of the furniture it’s painted on come together like a puzzle. It’s Paris. Rough and blurred, but Paris all the same. Paris by a bright golden sunrise, from a rooftop somewhere north of the Seine. (It is Feuilly’s rooftop.) It looks peaceful and glowing, beautiful and harmless.

Feuilly drops the paintbrush in his hand carelessly to the cobblestones with a thin clatter. He swallows. He looks around at his friends (who are watching him carefully) as though he’s only just noticed them there. He shrugs once. And then he walks over and grabs a rifle. At a distance they can hear the sound of the National Guard marching.

The ones who die on the barricade lie with paint smeared on their clothes, bright smudges of yellow and orange sunrise. Feuilly is at the top, paint still on his hands, having left fingerprints on his rifle and streaks on his pale face.

After some of the soldiers have executed the last of them (It’s Bossuet, Enjolras, and Courfeyrac left this time, and Enjolras lifts his paint-dabbed chin high while Bossuet and Courfeyrac hold each other’s hands so tightly thier knuckles go white) they go back out and stand in front of the barricade, the empty paint and oil tins around their feet.

They stand in front of the painting and wonder in silence.

 

\---

 

It’s maybe strange that they wait every time until the fifth to take any action, but they don’t question it. It might be to do with some superstition they all hold about Lamarque’s funeral, the reassuring splendor of that morning. Or maybe it’s not wanting to forsake the sign they had awaited so long, preparing and planning, rallying the people and gathering arms. It seems a very long time ago. And maybe that’s it actually, an unwillingness to give up that one more day of peace, one more day almost like the time before.

Enjolras is as determined as ever, if not moreso, although he’s quieter now, his face shuttered and dark more often, his heat more like a forge furnace than a torch. Grantaire, in response, has largely abandoned his mocking for a strained, victimless joviality that he doesn’t believe in and doesn’t wear well. He drinks less than he used to, except for the days when he drinks more than ever, and there are dark shadows on his eyes.

Courfeyrac’s brightness is more natural and more comforting, but whenever he isn’t smiling he looks very tired. Bahorel tends toward the surly. Jehan has gotten quiet.

Combeferre, one could argue, is taking it the worst. One revolution was already outside his pacifist nature—revolutions lost count of are almost more than he can bear up under. There is strain in his eyes and the line of his shoulders more often than not. He wakes every June fifth like a headsman who knows today is the execution of his own brother. The fact that they will rise again unscathed on the next fourth is no consolation.

At this barricade, Enjolras, wrapped up in his own grim thoughts as he is, doesn’t see that the tension in Combeferre is poised to snap.

“Combeferre, take the watch.”

“Why?” Combeferre says.

His voice is not loud but the word falls like a heavy stone. A couple of people nearby stop what they’re doing to look up. Enjolras, already on his way past him, stops and turns slowly around.

“In case an attack comes,” he says, even-toned.

“Except we know it isn’t going to,” counters Combeferre. It’s just as quiet as before and just as even as Enjolras, but nobody could ever mistake the words for calm.

Those who hadn’t stopped to listen at first are listening now. Nobody has yet questioned the ritual of the watch, or any of the rituals of the barricade, only taking their turns from battle to battle. Nobody wanted to be the one to say it. Nobody expected Combeferre to be the first.

“In fact, “Combeferre is saying, his voice rising in volume now, “We know every movement the enemy will make all night and into the morning. We don’t need a spy anymore, even if our false one still came to be shot.” His tone is nothing less than savage now, as he spreads demonstrative hands at the scene around them, palms up. “Is this what you wanted for your revolution, Enjolras? I’d say ‘surely one of them has been by now,’ except they’re all the same, aren’t they? The only difference is the order in which we—”

Courfeyrac has his hand up to touch Combeferre’s shoulder, but Combeferre sees what Courfeyrac sees a moment before and stops himself instead. Bahorel, without a word, has risen and grabbed a small powder barrel and a torch and is already halfway up the barricade.

“Bahorel!” Courfeyrac shouts. “Bahorel, what—?”

Bahorel only keeps climbing. Jehan and Joly, closest to the barricade, dart after him, but even with his hands full he has already clambered down the other side before they’ve pulled themselves up the first level.

Joly reaches the top first. He looks over and then shouts back over his shoulder. “He’s going round the corner!”

Jehan scrambles back down, grabs a rifle, then heads back up and hurdles the top of the barricade. Joly looks about to follow him but Enjolras holds up a commanding hand and barks a “Hold back!” to him and all the rest getting ready to follow Jehan over.

“What’s he going to do?” asks Cosette breathlessly. She doesn’t really expect an answer, but frowns when several of the boys glance at Marius instead of her at her question. She looks at him too, to see if she has said something wrong, but Marius isn’t looking at her. He is very pale and one hand is clenched in a tight fist by his side. Cosette doesn’t understand but covers it with her own hand. Valjean, on Marius’ other side, does not lay a hand on his shoulder, but does stand solid and tall next to him.

The barricade is tense and silent for a few moments. Then there is a terrific boom.

 

\---

 

Bahorel swaggers into the Musain at the next morning meeting with an enormous grin on his face.

“So how did it go?” he demands. “Did I singlehandedly win the revolution?”

“Very nearly,” pipes Joly with a returning smirk.

“It was an incredible sound,” puts in Courfeyrac, gesturing illustratively. “It shook the dust from the rooftops!”

“I saw it,” says Jehan, nodding enthusiastically. “A magnificent blast. Quite gruesome. I’m going to put a verse about it in my poem.”

They all laugh and grin around at each other as though this death of all of them isn’t a real death they are speaking of, as though the troops behind the ones Bahorel blew up didn’t just charge on through the carnage and storm the barricade early in anger and fear, as though they didn’t all die before dawn for the first time, as though it is still that first June fourth when it was all yet hypothetical and something to make boyish black jokes about. They clap Bahorel on the back and laugh a little too loudly, and so they put off a little bit longer the breaking point that had been looming.

Enjolras and Combeferre don’t laugh very much, but they meet eyes and smile an apologetic truce at each other.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Javert returns to the barricade.

Javert does not come to the barricade for a while. He only jumps on the morning of the fourth the one time; after that he just goes on his patrols, fails to report in on the days of the fighting. Even though a single day of his absence would be reason for his supervisor to believe him dead, nobody ever seeks him out—they are too busy with the revolution to notice.

So he patrols. Once he arrests the Thénadiers on guessed-at crimes that he bluffs having evidence for. They squawk and protest as he hauls them away. It’s very satisfying.

It’s been... eight revolutions? Nine? Ten? More? It’s hard to keep track without the difference of who died first to tell days apart. When he decides to return to the barricade it is not a dramatic decision. He just straightens his uniform jacket with a tug and turns toward the Rue de Villette as the sun begins to go down.

The National Guard lets him through when they see Javert’s uniform; the watchman on top of the barricade lowers his gun when he sees Javert’s face.

It’s Joly, and he gives an uncertain glance back over his shoulder when Javert starts to carefully climb the barricade.

“It’s, uh… It’s the…”

“The spy,” says Javert cooly, swinging a leg over the top. He climbs past a helplessly blinking Joly without excuse or further comment.

Valjean is sitting on a crate in the shadows off to the side with a rifle across his knees, watching Cosette chat with Courfeyrac (with a frowning Marius supervising), but when he sees Javert he stands. Before Javert can cross to him, however, Combeferre, who had hoped that after the last time Javert had stopped coming to meet with his murderer, steps in front of the inspector.

“Why do you come here?” he asks in a low, pleading voice. His expression is pained, is desperate to see. Javert rolls his eyes and pushes past.

“Go back to playing war, boy. You’re too young to understand.”

Valjean, to his own surprise, smothers a smirk. It’s very Javert—the Javert he got a brief chance to know, a very long time ago back in Montreil-sur-Mer—but it’s also probably true. He doubts even the wisest of the children around them could possibly understand the strange history the two of them have.

Javert walks over, doesn’t stride, doesn’t march, just walks, and sits down on a box next to Valjean. He doesn’t say anything, so Valjean doesn’t either. The students cast them wary looks but don’t approach them; Cosette glances over, questioning, but Valjean smiles reassuringly. So Cosette smiles hesitantly back and leaves them alone too.

They don’t speak. Javert stares up at the sky, his back straight, his hands laced together and hanging between his knees. Valjean steals a few glances at him, but Javert gives no indication of inviting Valjean to initiate, so he doesn’t. They sit in not-uncomfortable silence for several minutes before Javert speaks.

“You weren’t at the address.” He doesn’t take his eyes from the sky, veiled though it is with rain clouds.

“What?”

“The address you gave me,” Javert says. “The first time. Rue de l'Homme Armé, number five. I finally went there and it was vacant.”

“Oh,” says Valjean, rubbing the back of his neck. “The first time we’d… had a scare, the night before. So we moved. We haven’t moved any time since, so we stay in 55 Rue Plumet, now.”

“Hm,” is all Javert says, gaze still on the dark clouds.

“I didn’t give you a false address,” says Valjean after a moment.

“Yes, all right,” says Javert dismissively.

“You can take Cosette’s testimony separately, if you like,” says Valjean, half-jokingly, but is surprised when Javert cuts him off with a sudden impatient noise.

“It never—” he starts, but then stops himself. Valjean frowns at him, confused, and Javert finally takes his eyes from the sky to cut Valjean a glance.

“It never occurred to me that you would have given me a false address,” Javert finishes, looking back upward. “I just wondered where you’d gone.”

Valjean isn’t sure what to say to that. After a few moments he decides on, “Why did you want to come see me?”

Javert just gives one shoulder a restless half shrug. They are silent again.

“I wanted to thank you,” says Valjean uncertainly. “I mean, for the last time you were here. I never got a chance… but you…” he falters and looks over at Javert, who gives no indication he has even heard.

“Where have you been other than to visit my house?” Valjean says instead. “These last few barricades?” Javert is quiet. “Or should I ask why you came back?”

“What about you?” Javert challenges, looking at Valjean. “Why are you here?”

Valjean starts to gesture to Marius and Cosette but Javert waves him off before he can speak.

“Yes, yes, the boy,” he says. “And your… your daughter. Why? Because they really stand any better chance of survival with you here, these days? Because they asked you to be here, perhaps?” Valjean flinches at that and looks away, to where Cosette is laughing at a story that Grantaire is helping Courfeyrac tell, and which is making Marius sputter.

“For that matter,” Javert adds, “why is your girl here? I doubt she’s been struck with the revolutionary fever.” He snorts. Valjean turns back to him. Javert shrugs one shoulder again and looks down at the paving stones, frowning like they’ve failed to impress him. “There are already plenty who are on this side of the barricade just because they’ve nothing on the other.”

“So,” says a slightly confused Valjean, “is there something on this side then?”

Javert laughs, a harsh bark but not devoid of real amusement.

“Oh Valjean,” he says, “I certainly didn’t say that.”

 

\---

 

When the barricade is overcome, Valjean leads a weeping Cosette out through the sewers (Marius had fallen at the dawn attack). Javert notices but does not look at them, as if to disavow knowledge; he walks out unquestioned, thanks to his uniform, by the troops advancing on the lonely barricade.

He does not go to the river. He just goes home.

 

\---

 

Javert returns again the next fifth, as though he had never missed one, and sits again on a box in the corner, unspeaking. Valjean comes over and sits with him again when he is not up fighting with the boys. They do not speak.

It is only just starting to grow dark at the first death, this time. It’s Bossuet, an ugly gunshot wound to the head, hard to look at. Courfeyrac and Feuilly pull him down from the barricade and then turn their eyes away, but Joly comes and kneels by him, his face pale, and stares.

“It’s funny,” he murmurs. “It ought to help to know I’ll see him laughing again when we wake up. But it doesn’t, really.”

Jehan laughs, quiet and sudden and eerie, and everyone turns to look at him. He, too, is staring at Bossuet.

“A God-blessed fight, we said,” he says in a hollow voce. “I am beginning to think we were wrong. Rather the opposite. I don’t mean to sound alarmist,” he says, turning his eyes upward, “but I’m beginning to think we’re in Hell.”

There is a pause. And then, from his shadowy corner, Javert starts laughing. Not a quiet laugh like Jehan’s, but grating and wild.

“Beginning?” he says, and when the boys turn to look at him his eyes are shining horribly. “Only just beginning? I had it figured out three goes in.” He laughs more. “Beginning! Obviously we’re in Hell. Where in God’s name did you think we were?” he demands. “Marseilles?”

Many of them look disturbed, and Enjolras looks about to silence Javert by force, so Valjean grabs him by the arm and drags him out into the alley they know so well. As they go, Javert is still laughing.

When Valjean lets him go, Javert staggers into the wall and thumps against it with his back, whereupon the laughter suddenly halts. He closes his eyes and lets his head fall back against the wall as one final chuckle escapes. Valjean stares at him.

“You don’t actually think that, do you?” he asks. Javert’s eyes open.

“Of course I do,” he says simply. “I just told you, I had it worked out by the third time round. I have maintained some of my wits, at least, in my advancing age.”

Valjean goes on staring, at a loss for words.

“It’s quite the ingenious punishment for me,” Javert says with a grim cheerfulness terrible to see. “All your mercy, all your righteousness. The worst night of my life. It is cast in a bit of an ironic light, of course, if you’re damned as well.” He shrugs. “If it’s any comfort,” he adds, “I was very surprised to find you were. I figured whoever was right or wrong, one of us to Paradise and the other to the Pit.”

Valjean’s expression is pity and pain. “Why,” he says, “do you think we’re in Hell?”

“I’ve already submitted my evidence,” Javert replies briskly, mirth gone now. “I find myself in my perfect Hell, and conclude that Hell it must be. I die, I wake up here. I die again, again here I wake.”

“You died?” Valjean interjects with alarm. Javert ignores him.

“As you heard, those revolutionary idiots are reaching the same conclusion. Took them time enough. God-blessed fight indeed!” he snorts.

“Even if we have died, which I do not remember doing, why Hell?” Valjean insists. “Why not Purgatory, at least? We have both been good men, walking in the path of God. Why should you be so sure—“

“Because suicides don’t go to Purgatory, Valjean!” Javert snarls.

Valjean goes still.

Javert huffs an impatient sigh. “As I said, one to Heaven and one to Hell. Either you were the criminal I was bringing to justice, or the saint I was persecuting. If you were good, I was wrong about… everything. And then what? Take you in and send a good man to torment and death, or let you go and forsake… honestly, all I’ve been or done or known.” He shakes his head at Valjean’s stunned silence. “You unmade the world. Did you expect me to thank you?”

Valjean looks at Javert like he’s trying to look straight through his skull and into his thoughts, see the few ones Javert hasn’t spoken, untangle the bewildering ones he has, but Javert turns away.

The conversation seems to be over.

 

\---

 

Back at the other side of the Musain, the boys are quiet and shaken, not making eye contact with each other. Jehan sits in his corner, his knees drawn up in front of his chest.

Courfeyrac comes over and props himself against the wall next to Jehan.

“Are you all right?”

Jehan just looks up and smiles thinly in response.

Courfeyrac shrugs, a rueful concession. “Yes, well.” He inches a little closer and then slides down the wall to sit next to his friend. “You… don’t actually believe that we’re in Hell, do you?”

Jehan sighs. “I don’t know. I…” He looks up at Courfeyrac’s kind face creased in concern. Jehan swallows. “No,” he says. ”No, of course we aren’t in Hell. We can’t be, right? We’re…” He bites his lip. “We’re good people. Aren’t we?”

Courfeyrac grins, and that alone makes Jehan feel a little better.

“You, maybe,” he says with a wink. Jehan laughs a little.

“Ah, yes. I suppose you have some paramours who would disagree with such an assessment,” he says.

Courfeyrac lays a hand on his own chest, expression wounded.

“My paramours have only the highest opinion of me,” he corrects. “I am sure to give them no reason to feel otherwise. On the other hand…”

Jehan is laughing in earnest now. “On the other hand, the paramours of your paramours might have different opinions?”

Courfeyrac shrugs widely and Jehan laughs again, and Courfeyrac smiles to see Jehan laugh.

“Of course we’re not in Hell,” Jehan decides, smile content. He slips a hand into Courfeyrac’s and Courfeyrac squeezes it.

Dawn is far away yet.

 

\---

 

When the sounds of marching finally start to tremble in the ground, Javert and Valjean both stand. Valjean reaches out and seizes Javert’s elbow, who looks down at the hand without alarm or much interest.

“Javert,” Valjean says, low but intent. “Answer me honestly. Do you believe I am bound for Hell?” Javert looked up from Valjean’s hand and into his face, and then looked away again. “Javert.”

“Only God can make such judgements,” Javert says gruffly, pulling away.

The barest ghost of a smile crosses Valjean’s lips. “But one can tell a tree by the fruit. Do you think I am bound for Hell?”

Javert is silent for a few long moments. The sound of marching draws closer.

“It used to be that I could not understand a world in which you were not,” he says quietly, looking at the ground. “But now I cannot imagine the inverse.” He looks tired. “No,” he says. “I do not think you are bound for Hell.”

“Then hold to that,” Valjean says. “If you have no assurance of the destination of your own soul, hold to that instead. This is not Hell.”

He seems to be waiting for a response, so Javert nods once, tightly. Valjean nods back and grabs his rifle to go defend the doomed barricade. He leaves Javert in the alley, who stands and watches him go.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's a reason the boys aren't that eager to escape the barricade.

Nobody who knows of it has yet made any mention of Marius' survival. Marius has said nothing because even when he does survive, he has always fought to death's door, and is carried away largely ignorant that he lives at all. Cosette is still a little shy around the boys, and it has besides not yet occurred to her to bring up. Éponine and Valjean keep largely to themselves. 

The boys haven't lived to see anyone else get away either. They know Cosette has lived at least a few times, but then she doesn't really count, does she? 

Most of them are still purposefully not looking very closely at all this. It won't work for very much longer, but it works now. Usually. Very few of them have done any deliberate theorizing but superstitions form anyway, and Bossuet is not the only one who seeks death with a certain amount of urgency once friends start falling. Because after they die, the first thing they know is waking up on the fourth with another try, and it's not such a great leap to suppose it's death that sends them back. When it all goes wrong one more time, a firing squad and then it's all better. Don't be the unlucky one to survive this time, to get off the carousel at the price of outliving all your friends. None of them have said this to themselves in so many words, but it follows. It makes sense.

It's funny the illusions you don't realize you hold until you're deprived of them.

When Bossuet wakes up, it is quiet.

It is so peaceful that at first he thinks he is back in Musichetta's bed again with her and Joly. But he is aware of first a thudding pain in his head, and then throughout his body. He pries his eyes open as he tries to push what he blearily thinks must be blankets off his legs. Why do they have so many blankets on in June? 

When his eyes open and he realizes where he is, his pushing becomes more frantic. It is not heavy blankets on him—now that he's more lucid, he is starting to notice the pain of something pinning him down. It seems to be a heavy table. It must have fallen when that last cannon blast—

He remembers now. He is fully awake and he doesn't really want to be, because now he can notice the thick smell of blood in puddles all around him, and the silence. It's completely silent. Bossuet struggles out from under the debris (part of the barricade has collapsed on him, that is why they did not see him, he thinks long before he is really able to think about thems and whys) and totters into the café. 

There is a lot of blood inside as well. The sight and the smell of it makes Bossuet dizzy. Joly's the one who's good with blood. Bossuet never has been. Joly likes to say—

Joly?

He stumbles upstairs and then down again, into the back room, back outside, in search of someone, anyone. In search of Joly.

He doesn't find them until he gets to the alley. Yes, of course. He'd forgotten that they took the bodies to the alley. He didn't know that someone made sure they were all together even after they could no longer gather their own dead. That was kind. He appreciates it.

Joly isn't smiling. Often he even smiles in sleep. It looks wrong on his face, this blankness. 

It's fine, though. He'll smile when they wake up in the morning.

When the women come to wash the street, Musichetta is with them. She finds him still in the alley, lining everyone up properly—Cosette next to her father, Marius next to Cosette. Gavroche next to his sister (Combeferre told him, Combeferre has put them together before, they must have gone in a different order this time). It is heavy work, and his face is flushed with effort, his shirt bloodied.

She cries out when she sees him, and runs over to wrap her arms around him. He submits dazedly to the embrace, but his eyes are still over her shoulder on the bodies. When Musichetta pulls away, the front of her dress has blood on it too. She plucks Bossuet's cockade from his shirt and goes briskly over him, looking for injuries and casting nervous glances back over her shoulder.

"My god, if they see you… They're gone now but… Oh _mon chér,_ I thought I'd lost you both."

"What if they don't come back?" says Bossuet.

"They're going to," she replies. "I don't know when but it can't be long. Come on, we've got to go." She tugs on his arm, but he doesn't move.

"What if they don't wake up?"

At that she stops.

 _"Mon chér_?" she says hesitantly.

"What if I got out?" he continues, still looking at his friends. "What if I make it to the seventh and they don't?" He looks up into her face and he can see that he's scaring her but he can't stop. "I didn't mean to survive," he says. "I didn't mean to, it was an accident. What if they don't wake up?"

Musichetta has tears in her eyes. "Oh, sweet. Oh darling, let's go home."

She pulls him gently away. This time, he lets her.

 

\---

 

They go back to Musichetta's place. She wipes the blood from his head, takes his bloodied clothes, wraps him in a blanket. He goes to sleep that night in Musichetta's bed, her arms wrapped around him as she hushes the mumblings she doesn't understand.

When he wakes up, he is still in Musichetta's bed, but the first thing he sees is Joly smiling sleepily at him. Bossuet starts crying.

Joly's smile disappears and he reaches over Musichetta to clasp Bossuet's hand, but it does not calm him. He climbs carefully out of bed, so as not to wake Musichetta, and pulls Bossuet out into the corridor. Joly hugs him tightly and presses concerned kisses to the corner of his mouth.

" _Aigle_ , what is it? What's wrong?"

"I survived," Bossuet says, swallowing and rubbing at his eye with the heel of his hand. "I survived and nobody else did. I thought… I was sure I was going to make it to the seventh, and I didn't want to. I didn't mean to survive," he says with a hiccup. "Part of the barricade collapsed and something hit me in the head, and when I woke up you were all…" He shudders. "I'm so glad you're here."

Joly kisses his temple. "I'm glad too," he says.

They stand there for a few minutes holding each other, until Bossuet calms. Finally he lifts his head from Joly's shoulder and wipes his nose with the back of his hand.

"I just thought of something," he says quietly.

"What?"

"Well, I sort of thought, if there was a way out, it would be surviving." He pauses, but Joly doesn't say anything. "So I guess that means… there isn't a way out?"

Joly shrugs, and gives an encouraging smile. "We don't know that." 

"We don't know anything," Bossuet sighs. "I'd just like to know why. I know nobody's talking about it, but I know we're all asking the same questions." He looks up from the floor to Joly. "What do you think it is?"

Joly hesitates. "Well, I… The most likely explanation is that I've lost my mind, I suppose," he says, trying to sound casual. Bossuet startles and frowns.

"Lost your mind!" 

"I only said it was the most likely," Joly says hurriedly. "There are other explanations, I'm sure."

Bossuet takes Joly's hands. "Do you think you've lost your mind, _mon couer_?" he says, forehead furrowed.

Joly shrugs and smiles. "Sometimes. But it's not a very productive thing to think, is it? I mean if that's the answer, there's nothing I can really do about it. So I'd rather think something else." His smile grew a rueful twist. "Jehan said he thought we were in Hell."

"When did he say that?"

Joly bites his lip and squeezes Bossuet's hand. Oh. Bossuet squeezes back.

"We're not in Hell," Bossuet says, shaking his head. "That's where I just came from."

 

\---

 

Éponine comes to the meetings now, comes to them for real and sits in a chair like the others instead of waiting outside for Marius (or ducking out to avoid Marius). Gavroche comes to every meeting, and so now Éponine does too. The chair she sits in is at the back of the room, pushed up against the wall. But Gavroche sits on a table near Courfeyrac, near to Éponine, and ever since she started coming on his errands he sometimes turns around and smiles at her.

They don't give speeches and make plans now. They've all heard the speeches and there's nothing left to plan, and they get all their rallying done during the day. So they just talk and cast bullets. They still debate politics and philosophy, because they're the things that brought them all together in the first place. Éponine listens, but Gavroche, who has certainly had less formal education than even she, often speaks up. She is always surprised, both at his precocity and at the bloom of pride in her chest.

Tonight, though, the topic of conversation is Bossuet and the story he brought in today, and the mood is much more subdued. Joly sits scooted up right next to him so their chairs are touching, and keeps his hand on Bossuet's elbow as everyone agrees quietly yes, they suppose that if they expected anything but victory would break the cycle…

Gavroche slips away from Courfeyrac and Jehan's table and comes over to lean against the back wall with Éponine, his hands shoved in his pockets. She looks down questioningly at him, but he doesn't look back up at her.

"Could have told them all that myself," he mutters. It takes Éponine a moment to catch up. 

"You mean about surviving?"

Gavroche crosses his arms over his chest, his tone not quite as casual as he means it to be and his posture giving lie to the attempt. "Courfeyrac locked me in a closet and made me promise to be quiet, cos I owed him one." He frowns in disapproval at the misuse of the favor. Éponine frowns for other reasons.

"He told me about that. He said… he said they got you anyway."

"Told him that, didn't I?" he huffs. "Didn't want him to do it again."

Éponine swallows her sudden horror. Gav wouldn't want to hear it.

"So what do you think this is then?" she says. "All of this?"

Gavroche looks up finally, to direct a withering glance at his sister.

"It's a revolution, 'Ponine," he says like it's the obvious answer. And maybe it is.

Enjolras has not been participating in the discussion, has his head down staring with a frown at something he's writing that will disappear in two days. Grantaire, in another corner, looking blank without his bottle, is not talking either. He's staring at Enjolras, but in a different way than he usually does, a measuring way, frowning as well, considering, thinking hard.

Enjolras feels his gaze and looks up. He offers a small, uncertain smile. Grantaire smiles thinly back. Enjolras looks back down at his paper, the lines in his forehead a little reduced.

Grantaire goes on staring.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grantaire has a plan.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A chapter sooner than usual in celebration of our boys' beloved France. Happy Bastille Day, everyone!

It's much later, these days, when they depart for the night before the funeral. They squeeze every last bit of the peaceful fourth out and don't leave until it's technically a couple of hours into the fifth, when there is only the one bartender left, who would have thrown them out long ago if he didn't know they had a revolution to prepare for.

Gavroche waits to leave with Éponine, as they've done a few times now, but she smiles and waves him on. 

"Not tonight, I have something I need to do. I'll see you tomorrow, though." He nods, and with a wave and a returning grin, heads off. 

Courfeyrac seems to know Gavroche the best, but he left a minute ago, in deep conversation with Jehan. So Éponine goes to Combeferre.

He looks up from the supplies he's gathering with a smile. "Hello." 

"Gavroche," she says without preamble. 

Combeferre nods. "Yes?"

She hugs her own arms, as if it's cold in the room. "He's smart." Combeferre nods. She is ashamed to be only just getting to know her little brother that they all seem to know so well. "He really believes in all this."

Combeferre nods again, his eyes sad. "Well, in a way he's what this is all for. Him and people like him who suffer the most at the hands of a system that can't recognize his worth the way we can." He sighs. "The point of all this, I suppose, was not to win this republic for ourselves, but to die so that people like Gavroche could have it.”

Éponine isn't sure what to say. When he started speaking, saying "people like him," she expected pity, but that isn't quite what she got. She doesn't know how to respond to someone with the same fears and regrets for her brother as she is beginning to have, she's still getting used to the genuine and the heartfelt.

Combeferre looks up from his thoughts and smiles faintly. "Oh, I didn't get a chance last time we spoke, I meant to say-"

Here it is. "Our parents aren't very nice people, and they've never pretended to be nice to Gav," Éponine explains hurriedly. "So he left, soon as he was old enough to walk out. Me and my sister weren't so smart as that. He comes home every now and then, but not very often, and… well, that's why we don't know each other very well."

Combeferre's eyes are gentle. "I only was going to say I see the resemblance now, I don't know why I didn't notice it before." Éponine reddens. He pauses. "You have a sister?"

"Azelma. Just a bit younger than me. She takes care of herself by now. I mean, so does Gavroche, but…" She trails off helplessly, but Combeferre nods, understanding.

"But he shouldn't have to," he says.

\---

When the next day comes, she fights with them. There's thunder and lightning in her face as she stands on the barricade in the morning light, a rifle in her hands.

Gavroche smiles brilliantly. They still do not let him stand on top of the barricade, especially during the first assault, but Gavroche stands at the bottom and looks up at his sister and grins.

 

\---

 

"Do you remember the first time you died?" Grantaire asks Feuilly. 

It's evening and they're inside the Musain playing checkers while everyone waits for dawn. They've lost Jehan, this time. The mood is always more subdued when they lose someone on the fifth; everyone speaks quieter, huddles closer. Courfeyrac sits by himself, reading from a stack of loose leaf paper. 

"I think so," says Feuilly. "I was bayonetted in the back." He moves a piece. "Unless that was the second time."

Grantaire jumps Feuilly's piece and palms it idly. "I got drunk and slept through the fight." 

Feuilly pauses in surprise with his hand suspended above the board. "You… didn't die, then?"

"Oh, I did. I woke up just as they were about to execute Enjolras."

Feuilly takes a moment to process that, but to anyone who knows Grantaire it's not hard to fill in the unsaid. He pauses, looking up at Grantaire while Grantaire looks at the board.

“You were all dead,” he says calmly. “Enjolras was the last one left. He was surrounded, but I pushed through and stood next to him. He... took my hand.”

They sit in silence for a moment.

"Grantaire…"

"Are you going to move?"

Feuilly brings his hand down on the piece he was still hovering over and moves it. "Is there something wrong?" Grantaire laughs and Feuilly frowns impatiently. "You know what I mean. More than usual. Or different." 

Grantaire only regards the board and scratches his chin in thought. His hands are not quite steady, since he still doesn't have his bottle today. Their perpetual renewal is both a blessing and a curse for Grantaire's alcoholism—there's never quite enough time for Grantaire to start withdrawing completely on the goes he doesn't drink, but any progress he makes is undone on the fourth.

Feuilly glances up at Enjolras, who is sitting casting bullets with Combeferre. Feuilly is pretty sure Enjolras has been watching he and Grantaire all night, but Feuilly hasn't yet caught him at it.

Grantaire moves a piece and Feuilly promptly jumps it. Grantaire curses under his breath. 

"It's only that tonight you're awfully…and I don't know, you and Enjolras seemed like you've been… all right, lately," Feuilly prods. 

Grantaire glances up at Enjolras too, who still has his head bent over his work. "Well, not for much longer," he mutters. Feuilly's eyebrows go up.

"Are you planning to make it… not all right?" Grantaire doesn't respond, just moves one of his pieces. "Grantaire." 

Grantaire looks up and smiles dully. "Your move."

 

\---

 

The sun rises. The barricade falls. (Éponine dies on the barricade; Gavroche climbs up and takes her rifle from her hands, and shoots one soldier before he is killed.)

There is always a pause between when the artillery stops and the soldiers charge the barricade.

In that pause, while everyone is distracted loading guns or pounding pleadingly on doors, Grantaire hits Enjolras in the back of the head with a bottle.

 

\---

 

Enjolras wakes up in an unfamiliar room with an overwhelming headache and something wet on his face.

There is a terrifying moment when he thinks that Bossuet's story he pretended not to hear has happened to him. At least it won't last long with a wound like this, judging by the blood—

Some of the wetness on his face drips past his open lips. It's not blood, it's just water. He reaches up and touches his forehead, and pulls away a wet rag. He searches his forehead with his fingers for a wound, but there isn't one. The pain is at the back of his head anyway.

"It helps when I'm hungover, so I thought it was worth the try," says Grantaire. He's standing in the doorway, his arms crossed, and all Enjolras can think is he feels like he's back in one of their long ago meetings again, arguing a point with Grantaire. At first he's not sure why he thinks that because there's no familiar smirk on Grantaire's face, none of the old teasing, only jutted jaw, guarded eyes. No, he realizes cloudily, this is what was behind the smirk—the waiting, the challenge, the readiness to flinch. The stubborn, pained conviction of someone who knows they've just invited cruelty. He tries to think of what he said to make Grantaire look like this, what Grantaire has said, but they haven't said anything. His head hurts.

"Where are we?" he says.

"My place," says Grantaire. He's swaying a little. Enjolras finally notices the bottle in his hand. Ah. That's the other thing that's like before.

Enjolras is waking up now. He sits up fully—he's on a bed, he notices—and looks around, frowning. "Why are we here? What happened? Where is everyone?"

"They died," says Grantaire flatly. "Everyone died. If you stay at the barricade, you die. Even you must have worked that much out by now."

"Why are we here?" His alarm is starting to rise. He swings his legs off the bed.

"Because I brought you here."

"Grantaire," he says, figuring it out, making one last attempt to keep his voice level, anger and horror heating in him. "What have you done?"

"I've saved your life!" Grantaire snaps. Enjolras stands, a little too fast, stumbles back onto the bed. In the doorway, Grantaire twitches with the impulse to help him, but stays where he is. He takes a drink instead.

"I didn't want my life saved!" Enjolras snarls back.

"I know, you idiot! Which is why I had to do it for you!" He shakes his head emphatically, shakes it too much, his movements sloppy with the wine in him, and his eyes blinking heavily against alcohol and unspent angry tears. "Bossuet had it wrong when he thought he could get off the wheel alone. I'd have probably made the same mistake. But what would the universe want with him, or me? Out of all that wasted life, of all the people the world needs alive, it isn't us. It's you, Enjolras."

"And if it works?" Enjolras shouts back. "What if it works? Then they're all dead."

"They're dead," Grantaire agrees. "They're dead and you're alive and you'll hate me forever. Maybe you'll go out tomorrow on our first June seventh and go against the national guard on your own with a rifle in your hands and you'll die hating me. Or maybe you'll live, and you'll go back to having meetings with a new batch of young dewy-eyed idealists and you'll hate me. And I'll drink myself into an early grave, or maybe I'll hang myself, and you'll hate me, and perhaps someday, when France is actually ready, you'll finally give it its glorious republic and you'll hate me, and maybe you'll even live to be an angry old gray-haired statesman, and young revolutionaries will ride your hearse to new barricades and from inside your casket you will hate me." He nods, still stubborn but listless, his sudden angry energy just as suddenly gone. "I know. It's fine."

"It isn't fine!"

"Well, it isn't fine, then," he says carelessly. "Anyway, I have the door locked and it's nearly the seventh." He turns from the doorway.

"You're just going to keep me hostage?" 

Grantaire's retreating back shrugs. "Look at it this way," he says. "Maybe it won't work."

 

\---

 

Grantaire wakes up on the fourth, still in his clothes from the third like he always is, lying on top of the blankets in the bed he'd dragged Enjolras onto. He rolls over and looks at the other side of the bed. He has never felt so tired in his life.

Grantaire cries. He figures he's earned the right to.


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's such a thing as enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter took a while because I had to rewrite a scene and I'm in the middle of a big move, but it's extra long to make up for it. <3 Be patient with me for the upcoming stuff too!

Courfeyrac has always been inclined to wake up late, and therefore Marius, provided with the consolation that least he still wakes up earlier than his roommate, does as well. The hour is still early, however, when someone starts pounding on the door.

They both jerk away in their beds, but it is Marius who first makes sense of the sound and first staggers to open the door, one arm still half out of his dressing gown.

At the door is Enjolras, fist up and ready to hammer the door again. His eyes are blazing, his cheeks flush in a dread pale face, his cravat not quite tied like he lost patience with dressing midway through. Combeferre stands behind him.

“We’re revolting today,” says Enjolras.

Marius is still half-asleep and is having a hard time comprehending what Enjolras is saying. He stands blinking at Enjolras in the doorway as Courfeyrac comes up behind him, tying his dressing gown sash and rubbing his face through his alarm.

“Today?” says Courfeyrac.

Over Enjolras’ shoulder, Marius looks at Combeferre. Combeferre looks back at him. Combeferre looks very sad.

“Today,” says Enjolras.

 

\---

 

The majority of their gathered guns for the revolution are hidden at the Musain, but many of the boys have a pistol or a rifle of their own—a would-be insurgent cannot be too careful. They pick up everyone when dawn has barely arrived and gather at General Lamarque’s house as they did the first June fourth, as they continued to do back when they still had faith that Paris could be convinced to rise.

The people are as loud and angry and excited as they were the first time, if not more so now seeing the bulge of guns under the boys coats or in their tricolor sashes. They cheer and shout and do not notice the weariness in their young revolutionaries.

The revoluionaries see it in each other. Marius sees it in Enjolras, whose fire is devoid of light now and whose anger no longer holds hope. He sees it in Combeferre and Jehan, whose gentleness has been burned down to the dull routine of violence, and in Joly and Courfeyrac, whose natural joy has tarnished to bittersweetness and smiles that don’t reach their eyes. Marius looks around; they are nearly all here, shouting, throwing their fists in the air, as if they still believe it’ll do any good. Grantaire is the only one missing. Marius can hardly blame him.

The Guard comes even faster this time, but instead of shoving pamphlets into their audience’s hands and scattering, the boys roar in a wordless call to arms. The crowd roars back.

“To the barricades!” Enjolras bellows. Nobody needs to be told twice.

Bahorel and Bossuet, being furthest from the approaching Guard and not hemmed in, lead the charge toward the Rue de Villette, and start calling for furniture before the others even get there. Marius snakes through the crowd and joins them, stacking chairs and dressers and tables and mattresses as they are so familiar with doing now. Just as Enjolras and the others appear around the corner, Grantaire comes out the front door of the Musain.

“Well, this is a change-up. I wish I could call it refreshing,” he says with a grim twist to his mouth. He takes a swig from his wine bottle. He’s hardly made a dent in it, but the hour is still very early.

Feuilly frowns. “You’re already here?”

“Probably never went home on the third,” says Enjolras coldly.

Grantaire turns and gives Enjolras a funny look, a little pained smile, unsurprised.

“Here for the morning meeting, actually,” he says quietly. “Nobody told me it had been moved.”

Enjolras has already turned around to hoist an armchair onto the barricade, so nobody sees him flinch.

“So what’s the new plan?” Grantaire says louder, as he takes another drink. “Have we discovered that the secret to the people rising is giving them less warning and less incentive?”

“Grantaire,” says Bahorel as he hefts a door onto his shoulder, “shut the hell up.”

 

\---

 

Cosette and Valjean are on their way to the Luxembourg park to meet Marius when they hear the noises of distant rioting.

Cosette stops short on the street to listen, her eyes wide. She spins to her father.

“That can’t be—?” The grim expression on his face is answer enough, and she turns back to rush off toward the sound.

“Cosette!” Valjean hurries after her, but she does not slow at her name.

“Why wouldn’t he tell me?” she frets. “If they were fighting today why wouldn’t he tell me?”

“Cosette!” Valjean arrests his daughter’s elbow. She stops and turns back to him, fidgeting unhappily.

“Come on! We have to hurry, the barricades might be already surrounded by now!”

“Maybe he didn’t tell you because he wishes you not to be there,” says Valjean. Cosette shakes her head.

“No,” she says firmly. “He wishes me to be safe, but he would not deceive me.”

“Maybe I don’t wish you to be there,” he says instead, his desperation less veiled now. Cosette’s eyes soften.

“I know, Papa. But I have to be there. He needs me. I need him.”

“And what of me?” he says. He knows how this sounds, he knows how he’s being. He can’t help it. He’s held his tongue but every battle it gets harder to see Cosette as a soldier, to see her surrounded by such death. (He has not seen her die. He always takes care to die before her—no bullet will reach her while he’s there to take it.)

“I need you too,” she says, looking surprised, like it’s obvious. “You are my Papa and he is my love. I need you both.” The sound of a cannon blast whips her head around toward the source of noise again. She grabs his hand and tugs it the way she used to as a child. “Hurry!”

He hurries. As he follows her, he can feel his old bones creaking.

 

\---

The barricade is even more harried and precarious than usual, with Paris taken so off guard. There is maybe one other barricade, somebody thinks they heard, although they seem to have incited some chaos at least, since they can hear the noise of rioting in a few different directions.

Nobody goes to check on the rumor about the other barricade. They’ve given up on worrying about the other barricades, anyway after a couple attempts to make contact with them in early loops. The others don’t remember, repeat to repeat, and it’s exhausting to convince them, exhausting to care. Whether there’s one barricade or fifty, they’re still alone.

Since Éponine and Gavroche come to the morning meetings, they’re there at the early barricade. As of the first rallying of the Guard, Cosette is not. As Marius casts shot as fast as he can (they have always run low before, even with a night of preparation, and are doubly so now), he tells himself he should be thankful that she might not be able, this time, to follow him into death. He cannot quite convince himself. Despite the bright golden morning, the café feels dim, the walls closer together without her.

There is a cannon blast outside and Marius, distracted as he is, is startled badly and joggles the crucible. He leaps up from the table, cursing and scraping frantically at the flecks of hot lead on his hand.

“God, Marius, what have you done now?” exclaims Feuilly as he rushes over to see.

“Never mind, get the crucible, I’ll be fine,” Marius hisses, clamping his other hand tightly over the burn. He’s squeezing it as hard as he can and focusing on not focusing on it, his teeth gritted and his eyes tight shut, when he hears a familiar voice cry in alarm.

“What’s wrong, Marius, what did you do to your hand?”

His eyes pop open. “Cosette!”

She is taking his hand in hers to look at the tiny blisters just as Jehan runs over with a pitcher of water.

“Come on outside and hold it out!” he instructs, and Marius does. Cosette follows them out and clucks over him while Jehan pours out the pitcher slowly over Marius’ burn.

“I was casting bullets and had a small accident. I’m fine,” he insists, though he smiles a little at her concern. Jehan finishes pouring the water and shakes his head at Marius with a fond admonishment before heading off to attend to other barricade business. Cosette takes Marius’ hand to make sure it’s as slight an injury as he claims, and then, satisfied, kisses him on the cheek.

She frowns around at the bustle around them. “Why are they doing it today?” she asks. “Why didn’t you tell me? Surely it won’t—”

He squeezes her hand and shakes his head. “It’s… It’s Enjolras,” Marius says softly. “He just knocked on all our doors this morning. He… I think he needs to believe there’s something that can work.”

“Is there?” says Cosette.

Marius says nothing, just squeezes her hand again.

Outside the café, Bahorel smiles a welcome at Valjean and hands him a hammer and a fistful of nails, and Valjean gets to work helping secure the barricade. He tries to give Cosette and Marius a little privacy while it isn’t too dangerous, like he usually does at the park at this time of day, but just like always he can feel them in the café behind him. And there’s no question of this being a safe place for even a moment, can taste the blood and gunpowder that isn’t yet in the air.

But then, he thinks, looking around at the weary young men working quickly and quietly around him, he supposes everyone here can.

 

\---

 

The military response to this attack is less organized, but no less dangerous for it. The National Guard do not wait for signals from higher up, they do not hold back with the reassurance of reinforcements coming with the morning. None of the young soldiers have been briefed, the way they would have been tonight in preparation for tomorrow if the revolution had proceeded as before. They are frightened. They batter the barricade with cannon fire and grapeshot. Bahorel and Combeferre die in the very first attack. Feuilly is shot trying to pull Bahorel’s body down from the top of the barricade.

They’ve never lost so many people so fast before, and they all wait silently in the pause between attacks, looking at each other with faces pale and solemn. Marius and Cosette are holding each other’s hands very tightly. Grantaire is perched on his usual powder barrel, making quick headway on a bottle of absinthe and already barely sitting up. Enjolras is loading guns with Jehan’s help, his eyes dark and hard.

When a soldier starts barking commands into the stillness, a half dozen heads jerk up toward the noise, like frightened rabbits. Enjolras only stands and starts handing out the loaded rifles.

“Hold steady,” he instructs sternly. Valjean accepts a rifle, and turns his eyes away as Cosette takes one too. Even if he sees that a thousand more times, he’ll never be used to it, his little lark with a gun.

“Jehan, you continue loading guns. No, Joly, you’re staying down here, you know that. You’re to be ready for the wounded.” Enjolras issues orders as though they haven’t done this before, done this dozens of times, but nobody comments. Three corpses in the alley at mid-afternoon have shaken their old certainty. “Everyone, if I say ‘down,’ you get the hell down, understand?”

“As clear as day, Apollo,” says Grantaire, lifting his bottle unsteadily in salute. Enjolras does not look at him.

Another command is shouted on the other side of the barricade, and Enjolras nods. “All right. In position, but stay down.”

Cosette normally wears a simple frock to the barricade, but today she is still in her silk gown that she put on to see Marius in the park. She had blushingly shed her petticoats earlier inside the café, at Éponine’s advice, so now she spares only one hand to lift her skirt for the climbing of the barricade, her other hand wrapped around her rifle. At her elbow, Marius steadies her as they both climb up. Valjean comes up behind her, ready to catch her if she falls.

The first volley comes, and in the following pause Enjolras issues the order to fire.

They fire.

It’s noise and chaos and smoke, and then Enjolras yells “Down!” Marius and Cosette get down with the rest, but there’s a sound—the scuff of a foot, a falling stone, something small and unnoticed by the rest—that makes Cosette look up when everyone else is huddling for cover and trading out their spent rifles.

There’s a sniper on the roof.

Valjean sees it at the same time as his daughter, but his gun is empty. Marius doesn’t see. He straightens a little to hand a gun over to Courfeyrac, who is near the top of the barricade with Marius, and both Cosette and her father see the sniper focus his gun on its new target.

Cosette leaps up and shoves Marius hard with her shoulder, tumbling him down a couple of levels. She stands up, braces the rifle in her shoulder, sights (I never taught her that, Valjean thinks dimly, even as he reaches for her, but he is too far away, it’s happening so fast). There is a blast of gunfire.

The sniper falls. So does Cosette.

Her father catches her. Marius scrambles to his feet and rushes over to help as Valjean sinks to the ground, Cosette in his arms.

“Cosette?” exclaims Marius, panicked, his hands fluttering just above her as blood seeps into her lovely blue dress. “Cosette!”

It shouldn’t be particularly helpful, but Cosette’s eyes, squeezed shut with pain, flutter open to smile at Marius, so Valjean is grateful for it.

“Tell Monsieur Enjolras I’m sorry about that,” she gasps through the smile. “I know. ‘Down’ means get down.”

Marius glances up at Enjolras, but he’s turned away, staring firmly at the ground. Joly hurries over and starts pressing handfuls of wadded fabric to Cosette’s wounds—one in her chest, presumably from the sniper, and another in her side, from standing open to the fire of the Guard. The one in her side is bleeding out onto Valjean where she’s cradled against him, and he has to lay her body down on the paving stones to allow Joly to reach it.

“You took that sniper right down,” Joly says, and Cosette winces and closes her eyes.

“I had to,” she murmurs apologetically to nobody that they can tell, and then she pries her eyes open again. “He was going to shoot Marius. Marius, you're all right?" she asks, and Marius takes her hand and nods, swallowing thickly. She turns her smile to Valjean. “See, Papa, I have to come here, or who would look out for him?” Valjean takes her other hand, and this grown woman’s hand doesn’t feel very much bigger in his than the small child’s hand did the very first time he held it.

Joly is trying his best to staunch the bleeding, but it’s mostly out of kindness, since they all know what someone about to die looks like by now. Cosette knows too. She is still smiling.

“Come down here, Papa,” she instructs. He leans down obediently and she lifts her head to kiss him on the cheek. “Stop looking that way. I’ll see you soon.”

He supposes she’s right. Whether they wake up again on the fourth after this or not, he will see her soon.

The others continue to fight, but nobody asks Marius or Valjean to get up until she is gone. When she is, Valjean picks her up and carries her out to the others. His eyes are dry in shock, but when he returns he sees that Marius is crying unashamedly. Valjean nods, and Marius does too, and Valjean understands that Cosette doesn’t belong to him or to Marius, but that the two of them belong to her. They both pick up their dropped rifles and climb back up the barricade.

He’s a good man, Valjean thinks, and he’d thought that before but this time he finds he believes it, or maybe understands it, in a way he didn’t. He is a good man, and he’ll love Cosette and take care of her, whether they ever get to live their lives or they fight this fight for the rest of time. No, Valjean realizes, she’ll take care of him. She’ll take care of both of them, Marius and herself, just like she’s always taken care of her papa.

When the Guard at last retreats and the revolutionaries climb down off the barricade to regroup, Valjean turns to speak to Marius. But Marius is already walking toward Enjolras, where he has started to confer solemnly with Courfeyrac. Valjean lets him go.

“Enjolras.”

Enjolras turns around. Marius’s eyes are red; he has been weeping unashamed since Cosette’s death.

“Yes?”

“If we wake up tomorrow—I mean, on the fourth—I won’t be coming back.” He swallows. “Cosette will keep following me here as long as I keep coming, and I… I can’t lose her anymore.” He speaks quietly but not timidly, not like someone who can be bullied out of their decision. Enjolras doesn’t try. He just nods, like he’s been expecting this.

“I understand,” he says. “Thank you for fighting with us as long as you have. It’s been an honor, Marius.”

He holds out his hand to shake and Marius accepts it. Then Courfeyrac steps forward, his smile fond and his own eyes starting to water.

“Indeed,” he says. “An honor and a pleasure.” He pulls Marius into an embrace, and a moment later, Marius returns it. “Thank you,” Courfeyrac says hoarsely into his shoulder. He sniffs and pulls away with a grin. “Behave for that girl of yours, all right?”

Marius nods, smiles a little, agrees. Courfeyrac claps him on the shoulders and returns to council with Enjolras. Marius heads inside the café in search of a drink, just a mouthful of something for his dry tongue, to clear the atmosphere of blood and gun smoke from his mouth. As he stands a table and pours himself a small cup of wine, Éponine slips up beside him. They are quiet together for a few moments.

“I overheard you talking to Enjolras. That’s good. I mean, that you’re leaving. With her.”

Marius lowers the cup and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Éponine. I wanted to… We never really…”

She shakes her head, smiling gently. “There’s nothing that you owe me, Monsieur Marius.”

“Well, but. It’s only that—”

She holds up a hand to silence him. “You were good to me at a time when my life had very little good in it. I just wanted to thank you for that before you left. Since, you know, depending on how this ends up we might not be seeing each other.”

Marius frowns. “Be careful, all right, ’Ponine?” She smirks at that and he shrugs one shoulder in concession. “Well. Be as careful as you can.”

“You too.” She lays a hand on his arm. “You live well, you and Mam’selle Cosette. It’s good to have someone like that.” She drops her hand and looks over to where Jehan and Gavroche sit rolling rifle cartridges. She smiles. “It’s good to have someone who’s worth it.”


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They aren't the people they used to be, for better or for worse.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So my move is technically over, but things are still in a state of great upheaval (long story short, I'm homeless in Chicagoland at the moment). But here I am bringing you lovely folks your chapter updates BECAUSE I'M AWESOME LIKE THAT. Updates may continue to be slow until things become more stable though. <3

Javert is patrolling in a different part of the city than the fighting the time the barricades rise on the fourth, and by the time he hears the sounds of battle and goes to investigate, the fight is well underway and the National Guard is thick around the insurgents. There is much less sense to the Guard’s organization now than there usually is on the fifth, without the briefing there should have been tonight, and Javert nearly strides into the ranks calling order.

But then he doesn’t. He isn’t precisely sure what stops him. He’s never lent any help to the revolutionaries, though he stopped working against them quickly enough. Because what was the point either way? Their fight is doomed the same no matter which side of the scale his grain of sand comes down on.

So he walks on. Maybe the Guard’s lack of preparation will help the revolution. Probably not. It isn’t worth the trouble, he tells himself. Not today. He’ll come back to serve his penance at the next barricade. Perhaps.

He tries patrolling elsewhere—takes in a couple of rioters, chases a few more off—but he doesn’t have the patience for it today. Instead he walks to the edge of the city and past, until he can no longer hear the boom of cannonfire. He lingers there, milling about in a parody of his old resolute rounds.

He goes home early, when it is barely dark. Law has no meaning in the streets tonight.

(He should not be so used to that idea. His response to such things should not be to go home early.)

He has some beans and cold chicken for dinner, can’t concentrate on reading, goes to bed. He lies awake for a long time, firmly not listening to the sound of battle.

When he awakes Paris is silent. The barricades, what little there was of them to start with, have fallen in the night; many more of the Guard than usual were killed in their incautious aggression, but none of the insurgents have made it to dawn. (When the news of General Lamarque’s death spreads, it is seen as an ill sign instead of a call to arms. They do not have the funeral that day.)

Inspector Javert rises, puts on his uniform, and walks straight to the Rue de Villette. He is no longer hunting Jean Valjean, no longer needs to search the bodies of the dead for his quarry. There’s no reason for him to go. He goes anyway.

There are fewer women cleaning the mess of revolution than usual. There are just as many corpses as usual in the alley behind the café. Jean Valjean is indeed there, along with the boy he saved from the first fight. Marius. The girl Cosette is there too, but at a distance from her father and her beau. They must have been a couple of the last to die, must have been put in the line of the dead by hands that didn’t know them.

He stands looking at the dead, stiff and still. His eyes are dark and the line of his shoulders is as slack as that of the bodies in front of him. After a moment he frowns and scans the line of them again. Courfeyrac is missing. Javert walks back through the café and to the barricade and searches among the debris. He finds Courfeyrac in a niche at the bottom of the barricade where he must have fallen, his head tipped back and his eyes open, the old blood on his shirt gone tacky. Javert hopes he died quickly; with the angle it’s at, his arm was almost certainly broken in the fall.

Javert pulls him out and gathers him up, carries him out to the alley. Once there, he hesitates. Then he sees Combeferre and Enjolras, and walks down to the end of the line to put him with them. He supposes it’s foolish; the three will be alive and together again soon enough. But in the meantime they’ve longer to wait than usual and Javert won’t be the one to say they should wait alone.

It occurs to him only then that he knows these schoolboys. Knows many of their names, knows all of their faces. Knows their words, their tics, their friendships. He’s seen them all shot or stabbed or blown up a half dozen times at least.

Traitors, he reminds himself. But traitors to what? After all this time nothing feels real outside this barricade, even the government that they’re betraying and that he used to serve. Everything else is a tawdry set in a pantomime. 

It’s a hopeless thing, regaining the man Javert used to be. He stares down at the dead children in front of him, stares down at the dead convict (who frowns even now as though his dreams are troubling—dreams, perhaps, of being chased), and finally, finally, Javert gives up trying.

\--- 

There is no Enjolras at their doors on the morning of the fourth, to the boys’ relief. But there is also no Enjolras at the Musain for the morning meeting, either. 

They sit at the tables and wait and throw each other looks—all except for Grantaire, who sits in his old corner and sips absinthe slowly but steadily, not taking his eyes off the top of the table in front of him.

Combeferre and Courfeyrac promise to go find him, and they hurry out toward his flat. They don’t know why he would be there, but they don’t know where else to start. It no longer seems as likely as it might once have that Enjolras would run off somewhere to give a speech or start a rally.

They arrive at his door and knock. There is a long pause, and Courfeyrac is about to knock again when they hear the sound of a key turning in the lock. They both sigh in relief just before the door opens.

The relief is short lived. Enjolras is half dressed despite the relatively late hour, without jacket or cravat, his shirt halfway done up, his hair uncombed. He looks exhausted and dazed, and stares at one of them and then the other as though he has answered the door to strangers.

“You weren’t at the morning meeting,” says Combeferre.

Enjolras blinks. “The meeting. Yes, I… I meant to come, I’m sorry. I was getting dressed and I just…” He passes a hand across his eyes, looking embarrassed. “I just had to sit down and then I… Is everyone still waiting?”

“Yes,” says Courfeyrac. “We would have gone ahead to our usual rallying places but… we were worried.”

Enjolras nods. “I’ll come.” He nods again, more to himself, and sags against the doorframe, looking more exhausted than ever. “I’ll come. I just need a moment. I need to get dressed…”

His eyes are on the floor, so he doesn’t see Combeferre give Courfeyrac a meaningful glance and Courfeyrac nod in response.

“I’ll tell everyone to go ahead then,” Courfeyrac says. “No hurry.”

Enjolras nods absently again and steps over and away from the door. Combeferre follows him in.

“I didn’t realize how late it had gotten. I meant to come,” Enjolras says again as he walks back to grab a comb from a small table and tug it through his snarled hair. “I lost track…”

“It’s fine,” says Combeferre.

There is silence as Enjolras starts to set his hair to rights, turned away from Combeferre, until he suddenly loses the drive for it and his arms drop to his sides.

“Enjolras…?”

“It isn’t that I wouldn’t die for the republic a hundred times,” he says, still facing the wall, his chin dropped to his chest. “A thousand. I’d be bled to slow death a hundred thousand times if I knew—” He cuts himself off with an angry shake of his head, and disarrays his hair again running his fingers back through it restlessly. “Even if I didn’t know! If I thought it would give the people a little bit of hope. Or a little bit of shame. But…”

Combeferre is quiet, letting Enjolras speak.

“But the people don’t rise, and they don’t see, the sun comes up on the fourth and they forget. And we die, over and over we die and…” He makes a frustrated sound and shakes his head, tossing the comb on the table and striding over to the window. “And it isn’t just me dying. It’s all of you.”

“We’re all here because we want to be. You know that.”

“But you shouldn’t have to—”

“Is this about Marius?” Combeferre interrupts. Enjolras stops and looks up. “He wasn’t at the Musain today and Courfeyrac told me.”

Enjolras shakes his head and crosses the room again, to sit down heavily on a wooden chair. He props his elbows on his knees and cradles his head in his hands. “No. I mean, yes, but it’s all of them. It’s all of us.” His sigh is too small and pitiful a sound for the fearless avenging angel of the people. “I used to know exactly why we were doing this,” he says softly. “I could have so much patience if I just had answers.”

He runs his hand over his face. “I’m sorry,” he mumbles. “I’m going to come and join the others, I just… I just need a few moments.”

“Take as long as you need,” says Combeferre. “I can wait.”

\--- 

They do not go and stand on soapboxes. They do go and find Courfeyrac, and stand at the back of the crowd and watch him make speeches to the angry masses, but Enjolras makes no move to make any speeches himself. It’s a first, but Combeferre doesn’t ask him. He doesn’t even comment (at first) when he feels Enjolras staring at him; he just keeps his eyes on Courfeyrac and lets Enjolras think. After a few minutes, though, he glances over, and rolls his eyes when Enjolras pretends he’s been listening to Courfeyrac the whole time.

“What are you thinking about?”

Enjolras shrugs one shoulder. “Nothing. Only something Grantaire said.” Combeferre lifts an eyebrow at that, but doesn’t push. Enjolras glances back at him anyway. “You would… You would look good as an old gray-haired statesman,” he says, solemnly. “I’d like to see it.”

Combeferre stares back at him. “Grantaire said I would look good as an old gray-haired statesman?”

Enjolras reddens and crosses his arms, returning his eyes to Courfeyrac. “It’s nothing. Never mind.”

Combeferre hesitates. “How is Grantaire?”

Enjolras doesn’t look at him. “Why would I know?”

Combeferre almost snorts at that, but doesn’t. It’s not the real question anyway; he knows how Grantaire is. He knew before Enjolras did. He knows how Enjolras is, too.

“What happened?” he says.

“Why does something have to have happened?” Enjolras snaps.

“Because for a little while, he was fine. Or you two were fine.”

“Nothing’s fine,” says Enjolras. Combeferre doesn’t argue with that.


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Even fearless leaders have a breaking point.

Enjolras is not much improved by the time they start trickling into the Musain again for the evening meeting. The others can feel it and it grates on already frayed nerves. They are quiet and make unfunny jokes in low voices while Enjolras scribbles thoughts down on some scraps of paper with a stub of pencil, probably more to keep from looking in anybody’s eye than anything.

He only stands when Joly and Bossuet come into the room. He heads to the door, beckoning them with a hand. “May I talk to you two, please?”

They follow him agreeably back out into the corridor. “What is it?” says Joly brightly. “Going to tell us to take another day off?”

“Yes,” says Enjolras, but he’s not smiling. “Tomorrow.”

Joly’s smile vanishes. “Are you telling us not to fight?” Bossuet demands.

“I am asking you not to fight,” says Enjolras. “From now on.”

“Then we refuse to comply,” says Bossuet immediately.

“You need a medic at least,” Joly says.

“We’re not going to sit at home and wait for all of you to die,” Bossuet adds. “We’re not.”

“I think by now we know how to wrap or stitch a wound,” Enjolras counters. “And it isn’t just about you being left behind,” Enjolras returns fiercely. “It’s about the people you leave behind. You should understand that more than anyone, Bossuet.” Bossuet shuts his mouth. His eyes are pained.

“Is this about Marius?” says Joly.

“Of course it’s about Marius,” Enjolras snaps.

The three men stare each other down for a long moment. Enjolras sighs and closes his eyes, rubbing his face with one hand.

“I just… If any of us have a responsibility above that of our responsibility to France and its people, it would be to those who love us, surely? Surely if there’s anyone who should survive this, it’s the people who love.” When he opens his eyes, Bossuet’s hurt has softened a little.

“Your views on lonely souls have changed some,” says Joly quietly, with a sad smile.

Enjolras does not even look annoyed at the observation. “A lot of things have changed,” he says.

“We won’t fight,” says Joly after a pause. Bossuet looks over at Joly and opens his mouth to protest, but Joly reaches over and grabs his hand. “We won’t fight,” he says again, to Bossuet this time. After a second Bossuet swallows and nods.

“Thank you,” says Enjolras.

“But we’re staying for the meetings,” says Bossuet. Enjolras gives a tired smile.

“Thank you,” he says again.

There is nothing more to be said. Enjolras walks back into the room, followed by the other two. The different quality of silence in the room makes it clear they all heard the conversation, though most are pretending they didn’t. Enjolras does not meet anyone’s eye, including Grantaire, who sits very still and stares wide-eyed as Enjolras crosses the room.

Enjolras returns to his seat and resumes his directionless note taking. When the murmured conversation in the room resumes, Combeferre, sitting next to Enjolras, looks up from his book (nearly as much a pretense as Enjolras’ writings).

“That was the right thing to do,” he says very softly. “In case you were wondering.”

“I wasn’t,” Enjolras says, without looking up. “Don’t tell me about right choices, Combeferre. I know you have a living mother.”

Combeferre flinches, and frowns. “Enjolras… I can’t go.”

“I know,” says Enjolras. He looks up now, his expression strained. “And I can’t do this without you.” He returns to his papers. “So we’re both being selfish.”

There is an uncomfortable pause.

“What are you writing?” Combeferre says at last. “Another essay?”

Enjolras laughs a little, not a happy sound. “No. What would be the point? Everyone who would care to read it already knows what it would say.” His tone is hollow, and the words are so unlike him, sound like such the opposite of everything Enjolras has always been, that Combeferre finds he cannot even speak.

\---

If Enjolras wasn’t looking well on the fourth, an actual night of sleep to lose leaves him looking even worse on the fifth. He arrives at the funeral on time with the rest of them, but he has the hollow, too-bright eyes of fever. All of their friends who see him look around for Joly hurrying over to take his pulse and press a hand to his face, before they remember.

He looks so ground down that when they strike up the signal song, his friends are surprised by the force with which he sings. He belts the call to arms with as much power as he used to, more perhaps than he ever has, because the thing burning in him now is darker and hotter than it used to be.

Enjolras is hot and intense all the way to the Musain. Something about it makes Combeferre wary, and he keeps an eye on Enjolras as they build the barricade. It’s not as though he can’t do the task automatically by now. He doesn’t know what he’s looking for in his friend, though.

It isn’t until the sound of marching troops starts coming around the corner that Enjolras’ precarious tension suddenly starts to crumble. At first Combeferre thinks it’s the prospect of one more oncoming battle, before he sees Enjolras’ eyes going between closing window shutters and locking doors. The National Guard has reached the end of the street (he knows from the sound, he hasn’t needed to check over the top of the barricade to see them in a long time) when Enjolras climbs up and stands at the highest part of the barricade.

“Citizens!” he calls out to the closed windows and doors. “Parisians! Come and fight with us! Come and fight for France, for your freedom, for your families!” It is not his normal speechmaking voice. He sounds tired, pleading. He sounds like Combeferre might sound speaking the same words. “Who convinced you it was better to live safe as slaves? What fear is a better master than revolution?”

There is no movement from the buildings around them. The Guard is closer. It is only now that Combeferre notices.

“He doesn’t have a gun,” he says.

“What?” frowns Jehan.

“He doesn’t even have a gun,” Combeferre repeats. “He isn’t armed. Enjolras! Enjolras!”

“Citizens, _please!_ ” Enjolras is begging now, and Combeferre has never known what Enjolras’ voice sounds like begging, sounds like loud and desperate and thick with tears, but he does now. “Rise up!” he cries out. “Don’t let us fight alone!”

Combeferre is scrambling up the barricade. Jehan and Courfeyrac start up too, Courfeyrac with two rifles. Grantaire lurches up from his corner and stands, his eyes glassy with something other than drink, his mouth hanging open, staring up at the silhouette of Enjolras against the sky. Gavroche stands at the bottom, trembling with rage against the people of Paris, barely held back by Éponine.

“Enjolras!” Courfeyrac shouts, holding up a rifle. Enjolras ignores it.

“ _Please!_ ” he shouts.

The soldiers stop marching.

Combeferre has climbed to the top, but he can’t get as high as Enjolras, who is standing dangerously with one foot on the back of a chair and one on the jutting edge of a door. Combeferre seizes his jacket corner and tries to tug hism down, but his friend is standing steadier than he looks. He doesn’t act like he even notices Combeferre.

“Who goes there?” says the captain of the Guard.

Enjolras clenches his jaw. Combeferre can see tears on his cheeks.

“The people,” Enjolras says.

“Get down!” Feuilly shouts behind them. Combeferre and Courfeyrac duck automatically. Enjolras doesn’t. The sound of gunfire erupts. Enjolras topples off the front of the barricade.

\---

They fight mindlessly until the Guard’s first retreat, and when they are finally left in peace the friends do not know what to do with the respite. Both Gavroche and Bahorel are paralyzed with angry tears. Jehan is weeping openly. The rest of them are stunned out of words. Even Éponine, who barely knew him, is deeply shaken. They’ve lost Enjolras before the very end once or twice, but always it’s been in battle, always they could feel him fighting with them still. They don’t know how to be led by the ghost of an Enjolras who had given up.

They prepare for the night attack in the greatest quiet they ever have. And then, unfailingly, arrives Inspector Javert, in civilian’s clothes.

“Fauchelevent isn’t here,” says Combeferre wearily. “And I don’t think he’s likely to show. Marius and Cosette are no longer coming.”

“I haven’t come to see… to see Fauchelevent.” His expression is grave. “I had come to see Enjolras.”

“Enjolras is—”

“I know,” says Javert. “I saw him.” Combeferre flinches at that. “The troops are fully retreated for the moment if you wish to retrieve him.”

Without a word Feuilly and Bahorel drop their work to go pull aside the mattress blocking the way to the other side of the barricade in search of the body.

“We don’t really have any positions open for double agents at the moment,” says Courfeyrac a little bitterly. “Very sorry.”

“I don’t come as a double agent,” Javert says. “I come as a volunteer.”

He is met with silence. Gavroche and Éponine especially regard him with caution and suspicion. In the pause Feuilly and Bahorel come back around the barricade with Enjolras, and they all turn and watch as he is carried into the Musain. (Without saying, nobody considers putting their leader in the alley to wait alone for his soldiers.)

“Why?” says Combeferre.

“Because men do not lose faith as easily as some claim,” Javert replies. “It is only causes that do. Men’s faith must transfer… to something.” The officer lifts his chin as he might have once at inspection. He looks Combeferre straight in the eye. “And I am here as a volunteer.”

“Let him stay,” croaks Grantaire. He swallows. “What’s one more lost soul at this barricade?” He grabs some nails and a hammer and goes to help Feuilly secure the barricade further. “Anyway,” he adds, “I think you might be wrong about Fauchelevent.”

He and Javert look at each other for just a second. Then Grantaire turns to his work and Combeferre, after a brief hesitation, holds his hand out to Javert. Javert shakes it.

“Thank you,” says Combeferre.

\---

True to Grantaire’s prediction, Valjean shows up a little later, climbing over the barricade with his National Guard uniform and rifle.

“Wasn’t expecting to see you, Monsieur,” says Courfeyrac as he approaches, and Valjean shakes his head.

“I hadn’t intended to come,” he says. “But Monsieur Pontmercy came visiting when the fighting started, since no one could stand to hear it, and…” He shakes his head again. “He’s with Cosette. They’re safe. They haven’t need of me.”

“Thank you for your support,” says Combeferre. It’s stiffer than the thanks he gave Javert, who stands from where he is rolling cartridges with Jehan.

“Combeferre,” he says, and Combeferre turns to face him. “Am I correct in believing you still harbor a distrust of Monsieur Fauchelevent?” There’s only a moment’s pause before the pseudonym. He is brisk and businesslike and closely resembles himself at another time in his life, redressing a junior officer.

“Javert,” puts in Valjean kindly, in that low, permissive voice he used to use in Montreil-sur-Mer when he was about to forsake himself in favor of some unfortunate. It’s all Javert can do not to roll his eyes.

“The boy thinking you executed me serves no purpose,” he says. “It isn’t self-serving to disabuse him.”

Combeferre has gone from grim aloofness to confusion very quickly. “What?”

“This gentleman has never, upon obtaining custody of me, done anything but let me go,” Javert informs him without ceremony.

Combeferre blinks and frowns, and several of the boys look up in interest. Bahorel’s eyes narrow. Grantaire is the only one who doesn’t seem surprised.

“We have… a history,” Valjean says.

“That much, I’m sure, was obvious,” says Javert dryly. “At any rate, your distress on my behalf is unwarranted.”

“It speaks to your credit,” Valjean adds with a sad, quiet smile, “that after all that has happened here, it still bothered you that your spy might have died for malice or cruelty rather than justice.”

Combeferre has relaxed, looks a little lighter than he was, but his brow is still creased in a frown.

“Adding more horrors doesn’t make the first horrors less,” he says.

“No,” says Valjean. “It doesn’t.”

 

\---

 

The barricade without Enjolras is more like a tomb than a stronghold. The revolutionaries go about their preparations for the dusk attack in slow motion as night draws closer.

Valjean and Javert, as always, end up sitting apart from the younger crowd, but this time instead of Javert joining Valjean in quietly watching, it is Valjean joining Javert in the casting of shot. It has never left the boys from their first fight, the fear of running out of ammunition. Nervous hands keep busy in the pauses even now. Javert, seeing their industry, took his own share of supplies without question and set to work.

Now Valjean sits down with him at a corner table in the Musain and takes some of Javert’s scrap metal and begins to help, breaking it into pieces with a hammer.

“You seem to be here in a different capacity today,” he says.

“Which begs the question,” says Javert, without looking up from his work, “What capacity I have been here in of late. Not ‘spy,’ not for quite a while now.” He tips in some scrap metal to the crucible. “Nor ‘officer of the law,’ come to that.”

“Observer, perhaps,” says Valjean. “And what are you now? It looks suspiciously like a volunteer.”

“For good reason.”

Valjean regards him thoughtfully. “Are we revolutionaries now, then? Is it the thought of a free France that brings you here?”

“Is it for you?” Javert returns, unperturbed. “It’s as I said, Valjean. I no longer know who I am. And it has been made clear to me that I am not being allowed by God to excuse myself from the world on such a condition. And so…” he shrugs. “I suppose I must become someone else now. Too old for it, in my opinion, but I wasn’t asked.”

“And thus a revolutionary?” says Valjean. There is no mock in his tone. Javert shakes his head.

“A purpose in the meantime.” He is quiet as he waits for the metal to heat. He glances over to the table in the corner where Enjolras has been laid out, as at a wake. “I suppose you heard what happened.” Valjean nods. “Just before I arrived, apparently.” He shakes his head. “A fool.”

Valjean quirks his head at Javert. “A man desperate.”

“No doubt,” Javert agrees. “A desperate fool.” Valjean refrains from further comment and Javert glances up. “You’re a fool too, you know.”

“Oh?” He doesn’t sound particularly worried.

“The young lady hasn’t need of you?” At that Valjean looks up and frowns. “Ridiculous. I’ve seen first-hand the decision-making skills of every child here, and that she is among the better does not mean a great deal. And of course the boy is ridiculous.”

“She’ll be a society woman,” Valjean says.

Javert smirks very slightly to himself to hear Valjean admit he means to separate from Cosette for more than the span of an evening.

“There are a hundred old crooks in Paris society,” Javert says. “Nobody’s looking for you but me, Valjean.” Valjean doesn’t answer and Javert says no more. They work in silence.


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's one last plan.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh man we are at the home stretch, folks. The ending of this fic has actually been OFFICIALLY written, it just needs tweaking, and I am still homeless but STICKING WITH IT and I do it all for you my little macaroons
> 
> also a round of applause to Panera Bread for providing me with internet even if I can't afford any of their food
> 
> also have you noticed that this has been a really sneaky ship fic because if you haven't: sorry, this has been a really sneaky ship fic. And if you have noticed the list of ships in the tags you might have guessed it was supposed to be a LESS sneaky ship fic before it got completely away from me. But the one fully-realized ship in this whole thing is in this chapter, yay!

Enjolras wakes up on the fourth to knocking on his apartment door. He already knows who it will be as he pulls on his dressing gown and goes to answer it.

“We need to talk,” Combeferre says. Enjolras only nods and steps aside to let him in.

“The meeting?” he says.

“Courfeyrac’s going to take care of it,” Combeferre says. Enjolras nods again, looking at the floor.

“I’m sorry,” he says after a moment.

Combeferre shakes his head. “It’s not about that,” he says. “I don’t… I don’t really blame you for that.” Enjolras takes an apple from a box on the table, but doesn’t do anything but stare at it and wait for Combeferre to continue. Combeferre takes a deep breath. “Do you remember when you handed our spy—the inspector—to Monsieur Fauchelevent?” Of course he remembers. None of them have forgotten a moment of that first fight. “Enjolras…” Enjolras looks up from his apple and Combeferre meets his eyes. “That was wrong.”

To his surprise, Enjolras just nods and looks back down at his apple.

“I know,” he says. “It was... crude. Barbaric. Not justice at all. I saw that they knew each other, I knew what I was doing. But what else, then? We’d have to kill him ourselves. I saw a way to keep any of us from shooting a man in cold blood, and I took it.”

Combeferre is surprised. “That was why?”

Enjolras looks up and smiles thinly. “I reserve little selfishness for myself, but if I can’t be selfish for my men I’m not much of a captain.”

“You’ve been a fine captain,” says Combeferre. A pause. “He never died.”

“Who?”

“The police inspector. He never died at Fauchelevent’s hand, anyway. We… misinterpreted their history, I suppose. Fauchelevent let him go.”

Enjolras considers this. “Good,” he decides. “Good. One less death.”

“You sound like me.”

“Not such a bad thing.” He opens a cupboard and takes out a knife, then sits down heavily in a wooden chair. Combeferre comes over and sits in the other without being asked.

“They’ll rise someday, Enjolras.”

“Someday,” Enjolras agrees. “But not today. As much as I wish it… this revolution will not see them rise.”

“Is dying for France not everything you thought it would be?” Combeferre asks.

“No, that’s just it. It’s exactly what I thought it would be. Bloody, brutal. It’s death. I was prepared for death.” He cuts the apple in his hand in half. “I just wasn’t prepared for so much of it.”

“Yes, I was led to believe dying would be more permanent.”

“No, that’s… that’s not really what I mean. I mean…” He swallows. “It’s good to die for France. It feels good. It feels… right. It always does, no matter how wrong everything else may be. Like a thing I’m meant to do. I always knew I would die in the revolution, even when we started—oh, don’t frown at me like that, it was so long ago.” He sets down the knife and halved apple to scrub his hands through his hair, his eyes fixed on the middle distance. “I would go down with the barricades whether we won or lost. And that first time, standing with the sunlight on my back, holding…”

He flexes his left hand on the table and wets his lips. He goes on without finishing the sentence.

“I knew I had been right. About me, at the least. But all of you—”

“We fight because—”

“Because you want to, I know,” he says, waving Combeferre off. “But wanting to fight isn’t the same thing.”

Combeferre doesn’t say anything. Enjolras looks up at him, and his eyes are sad.

“We’re just boys,” says Enjolras. “All of us. I never really realized it until the first time I watched my friends die afraid. It doesn’t mean we can’t make a difference. But… there are too many of us, too young too… too full of love and life, for dying to be the destiny of all of us.”

Combeferre feels like he ought to be arguing the point about Enjolras’ own destiny, but his friend has always been a blazing torch rather than a lamp, burning himself out in one go for the sake of dispelling the darkest part of the night. Combeferre’s throat tightens.

“Well, what else are we meant to do?” he says. It is not a rhetorical question.

Enjolras looks at him, solemn, and slides the other half of the apple across the table to Combeferre. “We’re going to do this once more.”

\---

The fifth dawns cloudy and cool. Enjolras is awake to see it leave dew on the Paris roofs. He dresses and walks as slowly as he dares to the street the funeral procession will take. The city is only just starting to break out of the silence of night, the only sounds of the early risers low and sleepy. He drinks it in, the peace so soon to be broken, memorizes the shine of the morning on the windows of the buildings.

There is nothing, he decides for the ten thousandth time in his life, that he would not do for this city.

The streets soon begin filling with people also on their way to the funeral procession, and by the time Enjolras reaches the road, they are a procession of their own, moving silently in the same direction for the same purpose.

The Amis all know easily where to find each other now despite the crowd. He sees Jehan first, who smiles and waves. Courfeyrac is with him; Enjolras joins them and leans against a lamp post, listening as Jehan consults Courfeyrac about a dilemma between two possible rhyming lines. Combeferre joins them, and Feuilly. Bahorel shows up wearing a different eye-catching waistcoat than the battle before. No Marius. No Bossuet or Joly. Enjolras reminds himself that he’s glad they’re not here. He’d have liked to see them, though.

The funeral proceeds just as it always has, and when the people break the sidelines and flood the street behind and before, Enjolras’ heart hammers in his throat just as hard as it did the first time. He stands on the hearse and waves the flag with all his strength and the people, his people, the people of Paris, are singing all around him, and his friends stand with him ready to fight, and if Enjolras has ever been really, truly, perfectly happy in his life, it’s right now.

Then they round the corner to the National Guard, and there’s work to be done.

\--- 

They’re lucky, or else they are blessed after all, that they lose no one in either the first attack or the evening assault. Enjolras is careful, but he is always careful. And there are less of them to protect but there are also less of them to fight. They have had revolutions where they don’t lose anyone until the morning. It has happened before. There is no reason to take it as a sign.

Enjolras doesn’t know if he’s more of a fool or less of one for believing in signs after all this.

The others, at any rate, are in high spirits—or higher, anyway, than usual---at the lack of death. They sit on the barricade and sing and pass around a bottle of wine and smile at each other. It’s a picture not unlike that first night, with a few changes— the presence of Javert, stolidly cleaning guns in the corner, and Valjean next to him, handing him new and taking the cleaned ones. And Éponine, sitting with her knees bumping Combeferre’s and teasing him so he blushes. In addition to the faces missing is Grantaire’s, though only because he’s sitting inside, keeping his own company. Enjolras can guess why.

Enjolras crosses to where Javert and Valjean sit. “Monsieur, Inspector. If you could, I’d like a word?”

“Of course,” says Valjean. “What is it?”

“I’d like to speak to you both in private,” Enjolras says. “I need your help.”

\---

While the others wait for the dawn outside on the barricade, Grantaire stays in the Musain alone—supposedly to drink, although he hasn’t been giving it his best effort today. By the time the evening starts to fall, he’s slackened his intake to the point where the haze has mostly cleared, and he sits slumped over an almost empty bottle lost in his own thoughts and scratching shapes into the bar with a coin.

He can hear a particular voice having a low conversation in the next room with the inspector and Fauchelevent, the door open, but it’s not loud enough to make out. He’s listening just to the timbre of it, drowsing a little to the sound. His favorite sound.

Enjolras’s voice is serious and intent, the sound of his plan-making voice, though Grantaire can’t imagine what kind of plans he still has to make. The addition of Javert to their forces can’t possibly be so much of a game-changer.

After a few minutes Fauchelevent leaves, but the inspector stays for a minute more. When their murmured conversation ends, Grantaire glances up through the door to see Enjolras shaking the inspector’s hand grimly. He hears a “Thank you.” He looks back down at the bar. Grantaire keeps his eyes firmly down as the two of them pass through the room on the way to the barricade, Enjolras probably to give another speech or count guns or some such thing.

Except he doesn’t pass through. The sound of his footsteps stops behind Grantaire, and there is a pause during which Grantaire doesn’t mean to hold his breath.

“May I sit here?” Enjolras says quietly.

Grantaire almost laughs. “If you like.” he says.

Enjolras sits down in the chair next to him. Neither speaks for a moment.

“People keep asking me why we’re not… all right anymore,” Enjolras says.

Grantaire nods. “Me too.”

“I didn’t know we fought so much that not fighting was so notable.”

Grantaire glances up and lifts an eyebrow. “You didn’t?” When Enjolras doesn’t answer immediately, Grantaire returns his eyes to the bar. “Anyway, it wasn’t just our not fighting.”

Enjolras knows what he means. For a while, between the delicate understanding they had come to and the day it had come apart, there had been something good, something beyond just the absence of bad, solidifying between them, in casual exchanges, in smiles and silences and fighting side by side. Enjolras finds himself wishing there had been time to figure out everything it was.

“I’m not sorry,” says Grantaire.

“I am.” Grantaire looks up, as if trying to determine if Enjolras is serious, and Enjolras looks steadily back at him. Of course he’s serious, when has he ever not been serious, but the look on his face is as intent as he’s ever worn on a soapbox and Grantaire is pinned by the full force of it. He cannot look away.

“I understand… why you did it,” Enjolras says. “I understood even then. But you couldn’t be right, I couldn’t stand the thought of waking up the next day in a world where you were right, where I was supposed to be alive, whether it had been the fourth or the seventh.”

“None of us want to be the last one. None of us want to be alone. But you’re—”

“You don’t understand, it isn’t being alone. I wasn’t afraid of being…” He squeezes his eyes shut, his expression pained. “I wouldn’t have been alone,” he says instead.

Grantaire scoffs. “You would never have spoken to me again.”

“I’m speaking to you now.”

Grantaire doesn’t have a reply to that. He just chews the inside of his cheek and fiddles with his bottle.

“The more I watch my friends die, the more I value them for standing with me despite,” Enjolras says. “The more I lose them all for something we never quite achieve, the longer I have to stop and think before I do it all over again.”

Grantaire frowns. “I’m sorry. Am I hearing you losing faith in the glorious revolution, Apollo?” it’s his old mocking words but with none of the gaiety. He actually feels a little sick to his stomach.

Enjolras shakes his head, but slowly. He traces with a fingertip one of the shapes Grantaire scratched with his coin.

“No. Only… rethinking my priorities.” He smiles a little at Grantaire. “I feel I understand you more than I once did.”

“When you… The last time, standing on the barricade. Not even fighting. You… for God’s sake, don’t do that again, Enjolras. Don’t do that to me again.” There’s something they’re not saying about Grantaire being able to ask Enjolras not to do that to him in particular. Something about Enjolras not scorning the request. Both of them notice it. Neither of them point it out.

“I won’t,” says Enjolras.

“They will never rise. You’re fighting for their freedom but they’ll never help you or thank you.” If Enjolras ever believed him he doesn’t know what he would do, but he has to try, has to do anything he can to keep Enjolras from one more needless death. Enjolras only smiles sadly.

“Someday they will,” he says.

“But not today. End this. God, please. Please end this.” There are tears in his eyes as he begs. Enjolras reaches over and covers Grantaire’s hand with his. Grantaire stares down at their hands.

“I’m going to,” he says. “It’s just this once more. Combeferre and I talked about it—one more.”

“And then what?”

“And then I’m done. No more fighting, no more revolutions. I wanted to make sure you and I… stand right with each other tonight. That I have you with me.”

After a moment’s hesitation, Grantaire turns his hand palm side up under Enjolras’. Enjolras clasps his hand immediately.

“Enjolras,” Grantaire says slowly. “Whether you’d been sorry for anything or not… whether you’d laughed at me or spit in my face, I would fight with you if you asked me. And maybe that’s my failing.” He shakes his head. “We stand right. Nothing you do could change that for my part.”

Enjolras nods. “I know,” he says, “and I—”

“Appreciate it,” finishes Grantaire. “I know.”

“No,” says Enjolras. “That’s not what I was going to say.”

Enjolras tightens his fingers around Grantaire’s, who looks up. He’s not expecting Enjolras’ face to be so close. When they kiss, it isn’t all the things they’ve been trying to tell each other, but it’s a lot of them.


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This time, this last time, they are all exactly where they are meant to be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a short epilogue after this, but this is the conclusion of the time loops. Thanks for coming along with me on this exhausting enterprise, guys. :) 
> 
> There's some things that I never got to say, little things that I wanted to happen, conversations that *I* knew took place even if you guys didn't see them (see the ship list for a hint). I wonder if you guys would be interested in an "extended edition," with those scenes at some point? It might happen, and it might not, I already have so many projects I want to work on now that this is over. Maybe just a supporting oneshot, except the bits I'd want to add would be such tiny snippets I wonder how well that would work. I'd love your thoughts, at any rate!

Many of them sleep before the dawn attack. Enjolras can’t bring himself to sleep. When dawn breaks, he wakes Grantaire slumped against him, and Courfeyrac, who wakes Jehan sleeping on his chest, and one by one they all make a chain of gently rousing each other.

“Ready, men,” Enjolras says. “At your places.” They go from sleepy boys to soldiers in a moment as the sound of marching reaches them. Enjolras nods to Combeferre, to Valjean and Javert, and picks up his rifle, going to his own place on the barricade. At his right, Grantaire appears, holding his own gun, his eyes bruised with sobriety but happy. He smiles. Enjolras smiles back.

The marching stops.

“You at the barricades!” says the captain with the loudhailer. “The people of Paris sleep in their beds!”

For now, Enjolras thinks.

“Stay down,” he instructs. “Fight, but stay alive! That’s our priority!” They all nod in response, not questioning yet another new strategy.

“Ready!” yells the captain of the Guard.

“Ready!” yells Enjolras.

“Fire!”

It’s noise and chaos and gunsmoke. Most of them obey orders and stay down. Bahorel doesn’t and is shot, but only in the arm. Enjolras orders him off the barricade and he takes a place at the bottom loading guns. Courfeyrac gets a very lucky graze along the side of his head, and fights on with blood dripping from his matted hair.

When the artillery rolls in, Combeferre doesn’t wait for an order.

“Retreat!” he shouts.

The rest look at him, confused, and some look to Enjolras instead anyway, waiting for orders. “Retreat!” Enjolras shouts. Back at the door of the café, Valjean is already waving them through to the alley, so the boys, in great bewilderment, start clambering down.

“I’m not running away!” cries Gavroche. He grabs a pistol and starts to climb the barricade past the descending boys. Éponine, already at the bottom, doesn’t hesitate. She reaches up and snatches Gavroche and carries him, fighting and kicking, through the Musain and out to the alley.

Enjolras stays on the barricade, firing at the soldiers who try to advance, and in the confusion of the retreat few notice. Grantaire does. He makes no movement to retreat. Enjolras stops to grab a new gun and finds one placed in his hand.

“Told you, Apollo. I’m going to fight by your side.”

“Thank you,” says Enjolras. Grantaire smiles.

Javert grabs him from behind.

The inspector is a strong man, and has plenty of experience restraining men stronger than Grantaire. He has Grantaire’s arms locked behind his back, and no amount of struggling serves to free him. Enjolras does not watch as Grantaire is dragged away, shouting in anger. Enjolras fires a shot over the top of the barricade with the gun Grantaire loaded, and reaches for another.

“That’s everyone,” says Combeferre behind him.

“Good. Go,” Enjolras answers, not looking away from the fight. He fires another shot.

“Come with us.”

“Combeferre, go.”

“What if you’re wrong? What if this isn’t your destiny, to die here?”

Enjolras casts a pale smile over his shoulder.

“Then I suppose I’ll see you tomorrow,” he says. He reaches for another gun. “Take a pistol. Look out for the others. And tell Grantaire I’m sorry.”

He turns back around as a cannonball crashes into the barricade. Combeferre grabs a pistol and runs.

Valjean has headed the group in their escape route through the sewers, and Javert, with his furious captive, brings up the rear. It is slow getting them through, one by one, and Gavroche isn’t cooperating any more than Grantaire. Courfeyrac is helping Javert with the latter, but Éponine can’t get Gavroche through the drain on her own.

“Go control the child!” Javert barks, and after a moment’s hesitation Courfeyrac releases Grantaire’s legs and goes to help Éponine.

When they’re through, Combeferre stops at the grate and looks back at Javert. “I’ll follow!” Javert says. Combeferre nods and crawls in, leaving Javert and Grantaire alone in the alley. Behind them is the sound of the Guard climbing the barricade.

“Let me go!” Grantaire growls. Javert does. Grantaire stumbles away from him and stands for a moment staring and breathing hard.

“Well, go,” says Javert. “It won’t be the first time in these three days I’ll have broken an oath.”

“Thank you,” says Grantaire breathlessly. Javert nods and the boy runs off.

Javert pauses in the empty alley, as though contemplating going back himself. But instead he bends and crawls through, closing the grate behind him.

He catches up quickly with the group being led through the labyrinthine sewers by Valjean. Combeferre, at the end of the line, turns around at the sound of Javert’s splashing approach, and frowns through the dark.

“Grantaire…?”

“If I’ve learned anything from my life it’s where duty places a man,” says Javert. “Grantaire is where he’s meant to be.”

Combeferre’s jaw clenches, but he nods. He turns around and resumes the march. Javert follows, and joins the long slog toward air and light.

\---

The soldiers have overcome the barricade, broken through the barred door of the Musain. Enjolras is waiting upstairs. He doesn’t have a gun; he spent all the pre-loaded ones on the barricade, and he’s left his ammunition downstairs. He wouldn’t be hiding except that it might buy the others a little more time.

When the soldiers swarm up the stairs, he is standing by the window. He wants the sunlight on his back.

The captain pushes through to the front of his men, and Enjolras lifts his chin and stares the man in the eyes. A cluster of rifles are leveled at him.

“Take aim!”

“Wait!”

The soldiers part for Grantaire just as they did the first time, and Enjolras swallows around tears that weren’t there a moment ago. He is already holding out his hand before Grantaire gets to him, and Grantaire reaches out too. Their hands join, and Grantaire comes to stand by Enjolras. His hand is warm, and there’s nothing like despair in his face, nothing like despair in Enjolras’ chest.

“Just once more,” Grantaire says. Enjolras nods. He turns back to the soldiers.

“Go ahead,” he says.

They fire.


	16. Chapter 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So many little things are different--and maybe some big things too. History has some new players to contend with now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is it! I put up the mix I put together to listen to while I wrote parts of this fic up at my tumblr here, if you too wish to cry about it: http://thehumantrampoline.tumblr.com/post/59904207282/until-at-last-weve-got-it-right-a-mix-for-the
> 
> Once again this fic can be thoroughly blamed upon Emma (souryellows on tumblr) and Melody (firemoonsilverwaters), who made me write it, so if you get a piece of Les Mis in your eye, blame them. It was beta-read by Bridget (graintaire) and Elizabeth (inkgeek) who specialized in different sorts of feels so I could know if I was breaking everyone’s heart properly. If you're surprised by any ships... well, I might be putting up my little unwritten additional bits or adding them in or something later. We'll see. <3
> 
> My next big Les Mis project, among others, is an E/R Neverwhere crossover because I am a ridiculous parody of a human being, if that sounds like fun, idk. Thank you everyone for reading!!

June 7th, 1848

The room is already waiting for them before they get there. Someone different owns the Musain now, but they know to have the place ready on the seventh. It’s a large, loud bunch, but they tip well. Children run around the room and play under the tables, and the room is filled with laughter and voices. Every seat is filled—except two, together by the window.

Bahorel stopped bringing his kids along every year after the sixth one, but has made an exception for his newest, Armand; his wife, Florinde, a stout, laughing woman, holds the tiny thing in her arms.

“He isn’t but two months old but strong as a horse,” says the proud father with a wide beaming smile. “Little Alexandre tried to tip him out of his cradle last week, didn’t trust leaving him at home with Florinde’s sister. She can hardly watch her own backside.” Florinde whaps him with the back of her hand but smiles.

“Oh, come off it,” laughs Courfeyrac. “You know you only wanted to show him off.” Courfeyrac has no children; to the surprise of some (but not those who know him best) he has stayed unmarried. He is teased occasionally (again, not by those who know him best) that he is determined to stay carefree and unattached until he is old and gray. He laughs along with them. He lives happily with Jehan in a respectable flat in downtown Paris. Jehan makes no indication of marrying any time soon either.

Jehan is discussing the author Charles Baudelaire and his stance on the Romantics with Éponine over glasses of wine. Éponine has not worn her old rags in a long time, nor her old name. As Mme. Éponine Combeferre, she dresses fashion forward sometimes to the point of prompting whispers—her evening gowns are lower in the neck and her skirts fuller than any of the wives of Combeferre’s colleagues. They have two children; the eldest, Isabelle, plays in the corner with Marius and Cosette’s two. Combeferre, being in possession of yet a third opinion from Éponine and Jehan’s about Baudelaire, would probably be joining the debate if he were not discussing politics with Marius and Feuilly.

“I favor giving the government to the people as much as anyone,” Marius is saying, “but the case for it is weakened when it seems they can only think and act as a mob. Our opponents—”

“So we educate the mob,” Combeferre insists, leaning forward intently in his seat. “Our opponents claim the people cannot be trusted to make decisions for their own government but refuse to provide the people with the knowledge or opportunity to do so.”

“Really, it isn’t as though you don’t talk about just this all day,” Bossuet complains. “Save it for City Hall, can’t you?”

“Hear hear,” seconds Musichetta. “I’ve heard enough of this all weekend with the Women’s Union.” (She is Madame Joly these days, but their eldest child, Brigitte, has Bossuet’s nose.)

All conversation is momentarily interrupted by a great clattering up the stairs. A tow-headed youth with loose cravat and dazzling smile appears at the top.

“Sorry I’m late,” he says, not looking sorry at all. Éponine looks up and tsks at her little brother.

“Good luck getting anyone to not talk of politics now,” smiles Cosette. “Did you have a stump speech that just couldn’t wait, Gavroche?”

“When duty calls,” Gavroche returns, hefting Cosette’s small son Jean up and onto his shoulders. (Valjean lived to see him born, and his older brother Georges grow to a kind, precocious child, before Valjean passed with a smile and his daughter’s hand in his. Javert is only a couple of years gone; he died gray haired and harsh-edged as ever, but with a reputation for abrasive wisdom that he never much appreciated.)

"Don’t tell me these old stodges were debating suffrage of the people again,” Gavroche says. He gallops a giggling Jean around the room once.

“We’re not debating whether suffrage should occur,” says Marius. “Only—”

“Only how to minimize the damage, finishes Gavroche wryly, swinging the child down to the ground again.

“How to get it taken seriously,” corrects Feuilly with a frown. “It’s true that in the last few years—”

Musichetta throws up her hands. “And they’re off again,” she sighs.

“I’d rather talk about Feuilly’s new painting,” offers Cosette as she bounces Éponine’s youngest on her knee. “Has anyone else been by to see it? It’s wonderful.”

“I have,” smiles Joly. “And it is.”

“It took me all this time to get to it,” Feuilly says, “and I’m still not satisfied with it.”

“Don’t let him get bashful,” says Éponine. “There was a piece on him in the Herald last month.”

“He’ll be better remembered than all us old statesmen, that’s for certain,” says Combeferre. Feuilly ducks his head and smiles.

“I haven’t had a chance to come see the painting,” says Courfeyrac. “Is it the one you always...?”

Feuilly nods. “It seemed like the right time, with everything that's going on. It’s… It’s something Grantaire told me once,” he explains to the others. “They’re in this room here, in front of the window. Enjolras is holding a red flag, and the sun is coming in behind them, and their hands are joined.”

“Between you and Jehan’s poetry, they couldn’t ask for a better tribute,” says Courfeyrac softly. Jehan blushes.

“Nobody will ever forget the June Rebellion,” declares Gavroche, his chin high and looking like the impetuous street urchin again. “And when the dust settles on Paris now we’ll have a republic they’d be proud of.”

Combeferre fills his glass of wine and stands. There are the beginnings of lines at the corners of his eyes, and the slightest streak of early gray at his temples, and he is smiling. “To days gone by and days to come,” he says. The others raise their glasses silently. The night is warm and they are together, and even the two chairs in the corner don’t feel empty.


End file.
